George Friedman argues in his latest book that one of the forces underlying the nation’s current unsettled political situation is the growing disenchantment with experts. And indeed one can see that playing out in the tensions created by the COVID pandemic. The medical “experts” are advising us to close down schools and businesses – no doubt the correct strategy from a narrow medical point of view – but seem not to have thought much about the equally serious economic or educational consequences of their advice. So of course it is producing increasingly strong pushback from those put out of work, and from parents who are increasingly worried about the educational progress of their children.
In that context, David Epsteins’s 2019 book Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World, is particularly relevant. Very readable, with some fascinating stories and history (who knew that Vivaldi’s music was so influenced by the orphan girls of Venice, for example?), it makes a well-documented case for encouraging a true generalist education rather than the sort of specialization that is now so embedded in our culture. I highly recommend this book, and find it interesting that Amazon has paired it in their recommendations with Bill Gates’ new book on climate change – a good book from another generalist.
I suppose I resonate with this book because a deliberate generalist is in essence what a system engineer is. I happened to work in the aerospace field (rockets and satellites particularly). These devices are made of hundreds or thousands of subsystems, each developed by experts who are brilliant at optimizing their own particular piece of the system. But these devices as a whole live within a mass of constraints – power, weight, reliability, error budgets, thermal limits, thrust requirements, etc, etc. What we learned (at great expense) in the 1960’s was that left to their own devices, all these narrow experts optimizing their own subsystems in isolation produced products that failed disastrously if they worked at all. Successful development required that someone have an overall picture, and the authority to optimize across subsystems, not just within subsystems, and to negotiate necessary tradeoffs between subsystems, and hence the field of system engineering was born.
I can’t help but think that what was needed in this pandemic was some generalist thought across all the relevant fields – medical, economic, educational, political – to find a national COVID strategy that was optimal across all these domains, not just the medical domain. Of course the issue has gotten politicized, which hasn’t helped.
In any case, I highly recommend this book.
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