Polished Dinner Partners

Polished Dinner Partners

Education has benefits aside from stabilizing family incomes. Education makes individuals more polished dinner partners, for instance, something non-negligible. But the idea of educating people to improve the economy is rather novel. The British government documents, fifty years before this account, an aim for education other than the one we have today: raising values, making good citizens, and “learning,” not economic growth (they were not suckers at the time)—a point also made by Alison Wolf.

Likewise, in ancient times, learning was for learning’s sake, to make someone a good person, worth talking to, not to increase the stock of gold in the city’s heavily guarded coffers. Entrepreneurs, particularly those in technical jobs, are not necessarily the best people to have dinner with. I recall a heuristic I used in my previous profession when hiring people (called “separate those who, when they go to a museum, look at the Cézanne on the wall from those who focus on the contents of the trash can”): the more interesting their conversation, the more cultured they are, the more they will be trapped into thinking that they are effective at what they are doing in real business (something psychologists call the halo effect, the mistake of thinking that skills in, say, skiing translate unfailingly into skills in managing a pottery workshop or a bank department, or that a good chess player would be a good strategist in real life).1

Clearly, it is unrigorous to equate skills at doing with skills at talking. My experience of good practitioners is that they can be totally incomprehensible—they do not have to put much energy into turning their insights and internal coherence into elegant style and narratives. Entrepreneurs are selected to be just doers, not thinkers, and doers do, they don’t talk, and it would be unfair, wrong, and downright insulting to measure them in the talk department. The same with artisans: the quality lies in their product, not their conversation—in fact they can easily have false beliefs that, as a side effect (inverse iatrogenics), lead them to make better products, so what? Bureaucrats, on the other hand, because of the lack of an objective metric of success and the absence of market forces, are selected on the “halo effects” of shallow looks and elegance. The side effect is to make them better at conversation. I am quite certain a dinner with a United Nations employee would cover more interesting subjects than one with some of Fat Tony’s cousins or a computer entrepreneur obsessed with circuits.