The Ramifying Specialization of Occupation and Ethos

Chapter 9 of The Information Class

This post is part of a larger book about class, entitled The Information Class. It melds economic theory, virtue ethics, deep history and contemporary commentary, but the main theme is “the information class,” college-educated people who work with their minds using computers, whose epistemic advantages give them a natural leadership role, but who, in the United States, are being knocked down a peg by populism, with disastrous consequences.

At the time of writing, the president appears to be defying the Supreme Court over the deportation without due process of an innocent man to a horrific prison in El Salvador, while a crazy scheme of mega-tariffs opposed by virtually all professional economists has wiped out trillions of dollars in investor wealth and is causing a general sell-off of American assets.

Ultimately, I blame the popular loss of confidence in information class leadership on that class’s poverty in the area of moral reasoning, and I urge the class to rediscover and apply the long-lost tradition of the virtues, so that it can provide the West with a ruling class that is also a moral ideal, thereby restoring and bringing to new heights a general thriving of the economy and culture. Read on, and stay tuned for future chapters!

Now, a big part of what it takes to understand capitalism is simply to marvel at the vast amount of specialization and division of labor in a modern economy, and the incredible power of specialization to raise productivity. It raises three question: how do people get so specialized?

That's not to say that specialization is a distinctive feature of capitalism. Far from it! All economic systems need to manage complex divisions of labor. But the genius of capitalism is that the division of labor is more complex than ever, and yet it's all managed less by any customary or centralized prescription (though there's usually some of that) than through the emergent spontaneous order of the competitive market. That allows unprecedented personal freedom, while also unleashing plentiful exploration and innovation.

I mentioned before that economies can be classless, but they can't avoid income inequality. By the same token, though economies can be classless, they can't avoid occupational specialization. It's too necessary to the productivity needed to sustain life.

It's amazing how, although human beings are so similar in many ways, sharing a common human nature, yet they become so differentiated, and their thoughts and activities for most of the day become highly dissimilar, simply because of economic specialization. By what process does all that specialization occur? When and why do people become so differentiated? Part of the “why” would be answered by an economic theory that elucidates the productivity-enhancing value of specialization, but never mind that. Given that there is a need for specialization, how is that need addressed? What does the path to so much differentiation look like?

This problem is even more problematic in light of what we have seen about professional ethos. It's not just in terms of their tasks, or even of their skills, that people need to be differentiated, but also in their ethos. That takes longer to cultivate, and is to some extent irreversible.

Part of the answer is that there are steps along the way. Economic specialization is ramifying.

A simple biological analogy will help elucidate this idea of ramifying specialization. Think of the taxonomy of living organisms. Biologists organize it as a tree, with kingdom, phylum, class, order, family, genus and species being the usual branching points. Occupations are similarly organized with multiple levels of specificity in the Standard Occupational Codes maintained by the Bureau of Labor Statistics. An orthopedic surgeon, for example, is categorized first of all as “Healthcare Practitioners and Technical Occupations,” code 29, then as “Healthcare Diagnosing or Treating Practitioners,” code 29-1000, then as “Surgeons,” code 29-1240, and finally as “Orthopedic Surgeons,” code 29-1242. Sometimes there are more levels of classification than that. The BLS’s occupational taxonomy is never as detailed as the biological taxonomy, but it also doesn't do justice to the full detail of specialization in the real economy.

This analogy to the taxonomy of living organisms helps to capture the idea of a tree of ramifying differentiation. But there's not much similarity in how the ramifying differentiation comes about. Leaving aside the grand narrative of evolution, which in any case would lie far in the past and isn't observable today, living organisms don't in common experience come to be so differentiated by starting out almost the same, and then changing to become part of a kingdom, changing more to become part of a phylum, and so on down to species. Each organism is a member of a species from the moment it comes into existence. By contrast, no one is really born into an occupation, even if some societies do expect some people from birth to enter a specific occupation. People are born more similar than that, and the elaborate occupational differentiation they end up with is a product of education and experience. So it's helpful to invoke a different biological analogy to understand this.

A human being begins as a single cell called a zygote, and every cell in the human body is descended from that zygote through a long cascade of replication and differentiation. Neurons and nerve cells and skin cells and muscle cells all have the same DNA, but they descended from the single zygote by different paths, with many steps, at each of which genetically innate functionalities were turned on and off to suit the cell’s new role. There is such a thing as a skin stem cell, “stem” because it is a source from which further ramifying differentiation will occur, but “skin” because it's already specialized enough to ensure that all its descendants will comprise part of a human skin.

Human workers, as they gradually adapt to the specific economic functions they ultimately perform, similarly go through many steps and stages, which to some extent will have progressively classified them into categories and subcategories and sub-subcategories of worker, increasing their suitability and productivity within narrower and narrower functions. The orthopedic surgeon once trained simply to be a doctor. Before that, he was a college graduate. Before that, a high school graduate. Something about his occupational destination might have been foreshadowed in his high school GPA. More would be foreshadowed by his college major. At each step along the way, some choices were made, some options foreclosed, some human capital investment occurred, and he moved towards his ultimate destination of being an orthopedic surgeon.

The college graduate is like a skin stem cell. He has only gone partway down a path to productive economic specialization. He isn't quite good for anything, yet. And he may become many things: doctor, lawyer, programmer, manager, teacher, academic, bureaucrat, etc. But if all goes well, he will not become a retail cashier, a delivery driver, an assembly line factory worker, a receptionist, an agricultural field hand, a dishwasher, a janitor, or a home health aide. There are many occupations that do not need his education, but many others that do need it, or at least, they expect it, and they make use, if not of the particular knowledge he acquired, then of his general facility for composing and computing, creativity and critical thinking, and self-directed and goal-oriented activity in an abstract space that any properly run college both selects for and inculcates.

Unlike living organisms in the taxonomic tree, but like cells in the human body, people who are developing into the specialist niches where they will ultimately be most productive will often, along the way, attain generic membership in larger classes of occupationally similar people, before specializing further. And that's where class happens.