The Old-Fashioned Way
Sometime in the 1980s Smith Barney ran a series of TV commercials featuring the commanding John Houseman, who I knew mainly as the company boss in Rollerball and the beachside storyteller at the start of The Fog. Houseman seriously intoned the tag line of the spot: “At Smith Barney, they make their money the old-fashioned way. They earn it.”
My dad’s hilarious comment on those commercials was, “At Smith Barney, we make our money the old-fashioned way — we con people into forking it over.” What made this joke so delightful was that it wasn’t just a slam against Smith Barney (or investment firms in general), but also a wry comment that the old-fashioned way of making money is to trick people into giving it to you.
Why did my father, and why do I as well, view investment firms so dimly? Well, it’s simple. If I knew a way to make money by investing in the stock market, would I make a modest living by selling that information to others? Or would I just use that information to make a huge fortune by investing in the stock market myself? It would be a no-brainer.
Those Who Can’t Do...
The really spooky thing about this observation is that it doesn’t apply only to people who claim to tell you how to invest in the stock market. It also applies broadly to anyone who claims to tell you how to do anything that makes significantly more money than they’re making by selling you the information.
In other words, it applies broadly to educators. Why would I make half as much money teaching students how to program computers if I could make twice as much by getting a job programming computers? Why would I make a third as much money teaching students how to write movie scripts if I could make three times as much by spending that time writing movie scripts?
Of course, this doesn’t apply to all educators. Some professors with advanced degrees do actually make as much or more as they could make by getting a job in the specialty that they are teaching. But most of these are research professors who spend little time teaching students, and most of their time actually working in the subject at hand.
Where does that leave the average student, who is being lectured, tested, and graded by a person who makes far less money than the students can make when they get a job in this subject? Either (a) they’re being taught by someone who doesn’t understand the subject well, or (b) they’re being taught well, but they’re being taught a subject that most of them will never be able to get a job doing, because the jobs just aren’t there in sufficient quantity — and that’s why this teacher wound up teaching the subject instead of doing it.
Perhaps the old-fashioned way of making money is to sell knowledge of how to make money. Of course, that knowledge has to be either poorly taught, bogus, stuffed with fluff, and/or useless to the vast majority of those purchasing it. Otherwise the teacher wouldn’t be teaching it.
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