Shack here. Would you rather be a plumber or an actor? A lawyer or a blogger? There are obviously a ton of differences between the two, but a very fundamental one is the fact that actors and bloggers are scalable jobs, whereas lawyers and plumbers are not. Ben Casanocha, the 20-year-old writer, blogger, CEO, and wunderkind, has a great post on this:
Professions where you are paid by the hour are not scalable. A prostitute who charges $100 an hour only has 24 hours in a day. At some point, she will hit a ceiling on her earnings. Similarly, dentists, lawyers, contractors, bakers, and consultants can see only so many clients at a time.
By contrast, scalable professions allow you to make more money without an equivalent increase in labor / time. An author writes a book one time and his effort is the (basically) the same whether he sells 500 or 500,000 copies. A Hollywood actress need not show up at every screening of her movie to make money off it.
Career experts generally favor scalable professions.
Nassim Taleb, in The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, offers the opposite advice: pick a profession that is not scalable.
A scalable profession is good only if you are successful; they are more competitive, produce monstrous inequalities, and are far more random with huge disparities between efforts and rewards -- a few can take a large share of the pie, leaving others out entirely at no fault of their own.
One category of profession is driven by the mediocre, the average, and the middle-of-the-road. In it, the mediocre is collectively consequential. The other has either giants or dwarves -- more precisely, a very small number of giants and a huge number of dwarves.
Full post @ Ben Casanocha: The Blog.
Ben doesn't leave much to be said about scalability, but I find myself thinking that we make a similar gamble when we choose how much to specialize in our careers. Intense single-subject study, such as dentistry, nuclear engineering, or academics, provides job security and comparatively high wages, but requires a high initial investment of time and money, as well as the ability to develop your skills to a given, arbitrary level (to pass a certification board, bar exam, dissertation review, etc). Generalist fields such as the liberal arts give graduates a wide range of opportunities, but also a large amount of competition. Yes, you might make do great in human resources, marketing, or business development for that cool tech firm in Silicon Valley, but so would 1,000 other guys graduating with you.
The difference in generalist versus specialist career paths is the certainty of the skill required to achieve your goals. If you want to become a doctor, tenured professor, or electrician, you'll have an approximate idea of how hard it is before going in. You may misjudge your ability to pass a particular test or certifying agency, but the facts on that test or certifying agency are probably more or less public.
There's no book to study to join the publishing industry, no marketing bar exam. You get generalist jobs because of likability and results. Sound similar to a category above? Yup, getting a liberal arts BA is a lot like trying to make it as a writer, actor, blogger, or other scalable career. You may be paid by the hour rather than in royalties, but your job still depends highly on how much you stand out and how much people like you.
That said, the wage differential for liberal arts grads is much smaller than that of actors or authors. A English degree may be riskier than an accounting degree or plumbers' certification, but it's still a pretty small risk spread compared to performing, royalty, or pageview-powered jobs. The spread shrinks even less for bilingual students in Japan; our ability to teach English and translate brings the minimum post-graduate salary we can expect up by a factor of two to three. Liberal arts schools are a pretty good mix of risk and payout, and the flexibility of the education insures against a particular industry being outsourced or robotized.
