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Rachel's avatar

I mostly agree with you, but for one thing. You imply that a college degree is necessary to understand a subject.

I don't know anybody who can afford college right now. I also don't know anyone who reads like I do either. I have degrees, but in fields completely unrelated to my current interests. And my current profession? Flower farmer.

I felt that towards the end of this piece you imply that one must be fully credentialed in x to speak on x. If that were the case, you exclude anybody with a voracious hunger to learn but a simultaneous inability to earn those credentials. Whether it's time, money, or the feeling that the credentials are a waste of time.

As I'm sure you know, the US is a privilege-ocracy. It is very possible for an industrial worker to be very knowledgeable on Russian history. Or a flower farmer to be very knowledgeable on American class struggle.

That being said I fully agree with the rest of your arguments. Just felt a bit defensive about how one determines "expert" level. It's like, when I learned Spanish, at one point I just said, "I am fluent." Nothing magical happened the day I labeled myself "fluent". I didn't get an award or a degree. But at that time in my life I felt it was a fair description of my capabilities in understanding/reading/speaking Spanish. Note, one of my degrees (B.A.) was in French. Yet I have no mastery whatsoever of French. But I am fully conversant in Spanish. Please remember that formal degrees are only achievable by those fortunate enough to pay for them.

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hk's avatar

Back in 1990s, when Paul Krugman was still a serious economist who had a gift for writing about economics to a general audience, he used to complain that people who don't have rigorous training in economics love to write about economic matters and in many cases writing nonsense. True, up to a point, although my recollection of what I studied in grad school is that I learned lot of stuff about inverting matrices and such but learned very little about how exactly "economy" worked--which I guess says less about whether non-economists know much about how the economy works, as much as people who have the "right credentials" really don't have much to say either about the "economy" (On the other hand, I could teach ppl quite a bit about linear algebra, at least back in the days when I was actually smart....)

Of course, in case of Krugman, things got quite a bit funnier a decade later when he began spouting nonsense about things he had no background in but plenty of opinions after becoming a columnist....

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