Forum: Author Hangout

I think you are correct, but I don't think you have understood, or at least articulated, the more insidious reasons for the "over regulation".

In the end, the qualifications requirements are a form of laziness and incompetence.

You too have missed the true reasons behind such regulations.

Professional licensing is most often lobbied for by incumbents in the field as a means of reducing competition.

Professional licensing is most often lobbied for by incumbents in the field as a means of reducing competition.

Your right about how the professions frequently seek to restrict new entrant. The same thing can happen in other fields where practitioners operate independently, for example plumbers and electricians.
In my view, the most powerful "union" in Australia is, by a long way, doctors!
But for services where the government is ultimately footing the bill, I think it is overwhelmingly budget restraints, not entrance qualifications, limiting numbers.

They also want to pay Licensed Behavioral Analysts about $16/hour.

You can almost make that much flipping burgers. Who is going to go to school for 5(?) years for that?

I'll provide one other example of shortages. My son is Kalifornia got eased out of his job and decided to switch careers. So he started taking welding classes. If one believes the Commerce Dept. data, there is a shortage of roughly 600,000 right now (or so I've read). Once the shale oil find in the Permian Basin is opened by Trump, expect that number to go up. As well as the renewal of drilling in North Dakota with oil over $50/barrel again. For those that want the work, and are willing to work long hours, a 6 figure annual wage is within reach.

Shortages by guilds (in Middle Ages) or labor unions (today, but essentially the same thing) work to limit the market so prices (wages) are kept high. Someone mentioned doctors. Lawyers also. Accountants with the CPA exam. All of those professions are well compensated. And it stays that way until some way is found to remove the high cost labor. By either introducing competition or finding ways to get along without the labor (remember auto companies and automation?).

I see these things going through cycles. From plenty to shortage back to plenty. With wages offering the signal to draw people to or drive them away from a profession/career/skill/whatever. But it happens over long periods of times. Decades/centuries, not years.

Professional licensing is most often lobbied for by incumbents in the field as a means of reducing competition.

And a great big hug to our friends in the various unions out there. A lot of the stranger regulations that exist in several fields can be traced back to (trade) unions pushing for laws they thought would require employers to hire more workers... And grow their ranks as a result.

You too have missed the true reasons

Maybe, but I don't think so.

Certainly, professional associations/institutes/colleges will try to close ranks by limiting admissions when they feel the market is saturating, but that is at the tail end of any qualifications process. The groups without strong discipline/industry organisations are suffering from saturation everywhere.

I know where I live the "training" industry was seen as a panacea for the economy, and vast numbers of ridiculous qualification requirements were created and recreated in order to ensure vast sums of money were spent on "training", without the necessary oversight.

We are just now starting to suffer the inevitable consequences of that political convenience. People who are certified to do work they have little or no idea about making disasters wherever they go. Educational institutions taking the money and running, and not just a few. etc. etc.

Professional licensing is most often lobbied for by incumbents in the field as a means of reducing competition.

Or for maintaining minimum levels of competence.

Or for maintaining minimum levels of competence.

So those lobbying for them claim, but , with few exceptions, in the long run such occupational licensing laws tend to produce a greater reduction in competition than they do an increase in competence.

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2015/12/30/occupational-licenses-rollback/78105372/

So those lobbying for them claim, but , with few exceptions, in the long run such occupational licensing laws tend to produce a greater reduction in competition than they do an increase in competence.

http://www.detroitnews.com/story/opinion/2015/12/30/occupational-licenses-rollback/78105372/

And there are those industries where standards & requirements were relaxed, and every one has suffered as a result.

And there are those industries where standards & requirements were relaxed, and every one has suffered as a result.

For every one of those, there are ten where the standards & requirements are absurd and unnecessary.

Interesting claim. Can you back it up?

From the link I posted above from the Detroit News:

In July, the White House released a report detailing how occupational licensing laws have proliferated: "(M)ore than one-quarter of U.S. workers now require a license to do their jobs." At the state level, "the share of workers licensed ... has risen five-fold since the 1950s."

And

According to the Institute for Justice, no fewer than 42 of the 100-most common low- and moderate-income jobs in the state require licenses. Barber. Fisher. Makeup artist. On the whole, the average Michigan license costs $198 and requires 256 days in education or training.

Is this really necessary?

Not to mention:

And those are just some of the state occupational licenses. There are even more passed by cities like Detroit, which only restrict further an individual's attempt to earn a living. These laws vary — and conflict — from city to city and state to state, making it that much harder for Michiganians to find work and make a living.

Licensing hurts the poor.

We're starting to learn how much harm occupational licenses have caused. The White House put it best, saying licensing can "raise the price of goods and services" and "restrict employment opportunities" for those who need them most.

And with so many occupations requiring licensing, if you have ever been convicted of a crime but are trying to become a productive member of society You are screwed.

These licenses also harm those who have run afoul of the justice system. Once nonviolent ex-offenders pay their debt to society, they should be encouraged to rejoin it by finding a job or starting a business. Sadly, their government bars them from pursuing a career that requires a license.

When I asked, I was told the training includes information on hair car products, equipment, etc., that if improperly used could injure a client.

Yes, but with out knowing how much of the total required training is that kind of safety information it doesn't really mean a damn thing.

It makes a big difference if that is half the required training or only one tenth of the required training.

They never give that information to the general public when they use such thing to justify occupational licensing?

I wonder why? In my opinion the most likely answer is because such safety related information is such a small part of the training that the general public would be up in arms if they knew.

In a few instances, it's justified.

In very few instances.

In July, the White House released a report detailing how occupational licensing laws have proliferated: "(M)ore than one-quarter of U.S. workers now require a license to do their jobs." At the state level, "the share of workers licensed ... has risen five-fold since the 1950s."

In the fifties it was a term of my contract that I become Associate of the Institute of Bankers - a qualification which is officially rated as a university degree just to be a teller in a bank.

Our CPAs reckon that the accountancy part is harder than their exams and the law side is very definitely more detailed than a lawyer must pass. (That said we didn't do as much tax work or family law).

edit: I have translated UK terms into their approximate US equivalents

In the fifties it was a term of my contract that I become Associate of the Institute of Bankers - a qualification which is officially rated as a university degree just to be a teller in a bank.

Certifications required by employers by their own choice are not in any way equivalent to occupational licenses required by law.

If the number of jobs in various classifications is relatively stable, and the average years of education in the population is rising more quickly, the entrance requirements for all base-grade positions will tend to rise.

However, we have a converse thing going on, which is also causing the requirements to rise. As more people spend more time pursuing education, the "typical" quality of said education is also declining(or at least the quality of the person being educated is, maybe both).

There are high school students graduating today who know less about many things than an 8th grader probably knew 50 years ago. Likewise, there are Associate's Degree holders who likely know less about wide range of things compared to a High School Degree holder from 50 years ago.

There are multiple factors in play in that phenomena but it's out there. (A big one being that 50 years ago, many people who weren't motivated to pursue "further education" (which often included a High School Degree) didn't. They'd drop out and never get a High School Degree. So just getting that degree meant something(as it was largely optional for many jobs).

Move forward a couple decades, High School Diplomas become profligate, and the "quality of the graduates" declines, because now nearly everybody graduates, which now includes the unmotivated. Which means things move up to "the next level of motivation" which would be a certificate of some kind, or an Associate's Degree(2 yr). Which then held out until the 90's, when 2 yr colleges started to become a dime a dozen, and "paper mill" schools started to crop up(further degrading the quality of the "typical degree holder"). Which in turn moved the bar up to 4 year degrees, and everyone started getting those as well, which is where employers then started offering "starting" job positions in their company--with a 1 to 3 year work experience requirement.

Things have continued on that path since.

But it also comes back on the MBA's and this from Zom:

Back in "the day" supervisors and managers, and those responsible for recruiting, actually knew the job, and could assess prospects directly and accurately for the most part. Once the Peter Principle starts to saturate supervisory and management levels (mostly for political reasons) a method has to be found to assess prospects without knowing how, and the nearly universal method used now is to abrogate the responsibility to the institutions doing the training/educating. The notion being that if a prospect has the qualifications he must know how, and if, after he has been chosen, he doesn't know how, the blame can be laid squarely on the institution that provided the qualification, thus covering the recruiter's behind.

The popular MBA school of thought is that management is management. So you should be able to take a line manager at a shoe factory, and plop him down at a tire factory and he should be able to "manage" it just as well as he could the show factory line. Hell, you should be able to plop him down as management at a line working for Intel, Dell, or any of a long list of other high-tech employers as well.

Which gets us into the Management that now makes hiring decisions in many situations has no idea what they're actually hiring for. So they're checking for "qualifying skills/certifications" rather than actual knowledge or demonstrable skills.

Of course, further muddying the waters is things like Civil rights legislation from the 1960's and later, where having a hard set, in writing, listing of "required qualifications" for employment also helps shield them from claims of "discriminatory hiring practices" if push comes to shove.

I don't see the changing nature of skill sets needed for jobs because of new technology asa major problem - UNLESS there is an apocalypse.

I suggest for EB, there may be something much more relevant to a post-apocalyptic scenario that professions being eroded by over regulation.

That might be which professions would be incapable of functioning anymore without the technology they have come to rely on.

The comments by @ustourist suggest all accountants, engineers, and car mechanics could not function after an apocalypse, for starters!

Once upon a time schools did a better job of educating their students. Most kids went to work when they reached their teens, having passed grade school or gotten sufficient basic education.

We also used to take shop classes in high school, where you learned wood working skills, welding skills, and assorted other real world job skills. But that's what participation trophies give you.

If you were adopted then you are not allowed to have a birth certificate

This is the truly stupid requirement. Just because you were adopted, doesn't mean you weren't born.

sejintenej

If you were adopted then you are not allowed to have a birth certificate

This is the truly stupid requirement. Just because you were adopted, doesn't mean you weren't born.

Yes and no!
An adoption Certificate looks like a birth certificate except for the title and changing "parents" to "adopters" etc.. For any normal purpose (like getting a passport)it is accepted in place of a birth certificate. It is just the education authorities who are uneducated.

An adoptee generally cannot know who his/her birth parents are/were. It is supposed to protect both birth parents and the adoptee. In my lifetime the rules have been relaxed a bit - after satisfying a psycho that he / she will not be mentally affected the names of the birth parents can be released.

I got my original birth certificate without the testing or producing ID, simply by saying that I wanted a copy of my own birth certificate (From the age of 16 I knew the full history through two adoptions and even remember being in court for the second one). That should not have been allowed.

The SJA still run courses, but not as many or as often as they used to run, not sure if they still do the higher level ones. Most of the higher levels ones are now done by a few accredited universities and the like.

In the UK any workplace with more than a small number of employees must have a qualified first aider on site. Various organisations including St Johns Ambulance do the courses but the required standard is pretty low.
They also do many more advanced courses - I started at school when I was 16 and went through most of them (because of the Cold War) though at that time we didn't use drugs as modern paramedics can.

SJA is linked with the Order of St John of Jerusalem which goes back to the crusades to Jerusalem.