This is a problem not only for regulators, but pretty much any profession we might want to improve.
Our labor pool is vast, but fixed. There is some fungibility among the individual workers... a welder can be re-trained as a teacher, or a miner can be re-trained to become a web developer. But it isn't perfectly fungible, the 45 yr taxi cab driver can't re-train to be an oncologist, and he certainly can't re-train to be a pharmaceutical engineer.
We might even say that they're not even mostly fungible... not for the professions we really want the most.
So how many "better regulators" do you need? Do you need two more, nationwide? We could probably find those. Do you need 24? A little more difficult, but as long as you are willing to wait 18 months or so, doable.
Do you need 300? 600? 800? Exactly how many at the FDA have to be superior regulators there? Worse still, even if the number is low...
What incentivizes someone who could be the superior regulator, but has chosen to be whatever-else-it-is-that-they-are? Do we need to offer more money? How much more? Million dollar salaries for one or two is feasible, but not for 800. Worse, even if we can afford it, offering that much money doesn't just attract them, it attracts many more inferior regulators.
Can you tell the difference? If three people show up for the $500,000/year regulator job, and two are schmoozing assholes, and the third is hyper-competent, what hiring system can you devise to reliably pass on the two and pick the other?
If the signal-to-noise ratio is too high there, it can likely overwhelm even a good hiring system.
And if it's bad for regulators, then this is simply a losing strategy for jobs like teachers, where we don't need a few dozen or a few dozen "better teachers", but hundreds of thousand of them. Police, etc.
NoMoreNicksLeft|2 years ago
Our labor pool is vast, but fixed. There is some fungibility among the individual workers... a welder can be re-trained as a teacher, or a miner can be re-trained to become a web developer. But it isn't perfectly fungible, the 45 yr taxi cab driver can't re-train to be an oncologist, and he certainly can't re-train to be a pharmaceutical engineer.
We might even say that they're not even mostly fungible... not for the professions we really want the most.
So how many "better regulators" do you need? Do you need two more, nationwide? We could probably find those. Do you need 24? A little more difficult, but as long as you are willing to wait 18 months or so, doable.
Do you need 300? 600? 800? Exactly how many at the FDA have to be superior regulators there? Worse still, even if the number is low...
What incentivizes someone who could be the superior regulator, but has chosen to be whatever-else-it-is-that-they-are? Do we need to offer more money? How much more? Million dollar salaries for one or two is feasible, but not for 800. Worse, even if we can afford it, offering that much money doesn't just attract them, it attracts many more inferior regulators.
Can you tell the difference? If three people show up for the $500,000/year regulator job, and two are schmoozing assholes, and the third is hyper-competent, what hiring system can you devise to reliably pass on the two and pick the other?
If the signal-to-noise ratio is too high there, it can likely overwhelm even a good hiring system.
And if it's bad for regulators, then this is simply a losing strategy for jobs like teachers, where we don't need a few dozen or a few dozen "better teachers", but hundreds of thousand of them. Police, etc.