Attracting, Creating and Keeping Educated People is Essential

More Money isn't the Solution

There has oft been talk about ways of improving the economy, develping new technology and improving life in general. Governments often talk about spending more money at problems, more money to health care, more money to infrastructure, more money to all sorts of programs. What if, one day you stripped society of money-- simply, what if money stoped existing, what would you have left? What is left is the people that do the work to make things work. Money isn't the resource that its key, it's people.

It's Human Resources

Simply having money does not generate wealth. Financial managers realize this the best. When these people look at investing the hard earned money of other people what they are looking for are the right group of people with the right kind of ideas to make them reality. We are talking about people, it has always been about people and it will always be about people. There is a specific reason why the US in the past has been so innovative in terms of technology-- it was for the "American Dream" and the open immigration policies that attracted people to the States. The important thing was that America at the time attracted all sorts of people because it had the image of a desirable place to live, most importantly, it also attracted highly determined and skilled people. If it were not for the right kind of people, the States would not be where it is today.

I am fortunate to say that I have had the opportunity to study in a different educational institution in a totally different country. I studied at the University of British Columbia which is currently ranked 37 th in the world and I am currently at Tohoku University which is ranked 73rd in the world (source). There is a significant difference in world rankings and after coming to this University I realize why. The university and student culture is totally different from where I was before. The students in terms of background knowledge are significantly weaker compared to those at UBC. In fact it is of my humble opinion that the university educational system is signficantly inferior compared to the North American model in terms of producing knowledgable students. When it comes to producting good and interesting work, the culture of people around you is essential.

For anyone that has worked on group projects or part of a team, it is evident that the quality of the members have a signficant impact of the quality of the finished product. This is something that everyone since junior high school knows-- either you partner with friends or you partner with people that you know have a history of doing good work (the collary is true for deciding which people you will not partner with). When it comes to University research, starting a company or working with people on a good will project--the deciding factor is the people that get things to work.

The Compounding (or Positivie Feedback) Effect

For people that studied control theory or differential equations or have a bank account, you will understand this. In terms of money, if you have money in your bank account, you earn interest on that money. You take that money and the interest to earn more interest. What happens is that the growth of your money is exponential and it explodes over a period of time. This is the what is known as compounding. This is true in theory, but we get shafted on the interest rates. People on the other hand, have far better compounding rates and let me explain why (and no, I'm not talking about reproductive compounding).

When I talk about skilled people, I am going narrow the discussion of highly applied and educated people. Let me pose this discussion in the frame of universities. There is a reason why good universities are the breeding grounds of successful companies (which are the result of skilled people). Good universities are the hub where skilled individuals converge. The better the university the more skilled the people there.

Places with skilled people attract skilled people. There are 2 reasons why this occurs. Firstly, skilled people want to learn from skilled people (ie. their professors). When you choose a university institution you usually want to go for the best possbile because the better the people are the more you will learn from them. People with less knowledge and skill will obviously have less to teach. Secondly, what most students may or may not realize is that going to good universities will allow them to interact with other skilled people (ie. their peers), possibly learning and working with them. Putting it this way, suppose that you had a group of 10,000 very skilled people, every person would be able to interact with 9,999 other very talented people, not that they would interact with them all. Being exposed to a large pool of talented people only further increases the the amount of interesting things they may learn. If people are resources, then this is important.

As a reminder of warning, simply just being at a good insitution does not mean that you will automatically become a highly skilled individual. There is an element of personal drive which I have not mentioned but assumed that everyone carries.

The end result is that good universties attract skilled people, which in turn trains these people to become even more skilled. This is the compounding effect. But what of other institutions that aren't near the top? Unfortunately, for these institutions, the few skilled people they create often move on into better institutions. These places face the opposite compounding effects or negative feedback.

Success is Achieving Positive Feedback

When you want to build anything successful, whether it be a company, university or a country, you need the right people and there are only 2 ways that you can get them-- either creating them or attracting them. The second problem that needs to be addressed is keeping them. When these two conditions are achieved then you can achieve whatever in your grasp and keep going from there. This is the creation of a successful system-- the founders of Google understood this. If there is one shortage that Silicon Valley faces right now, it's skilled people that are outside of Google, because they've been getting their hands on the most skilled people-- it's the people that makes them successful; search and web advertising was done before, its the way they do it that makes them successful! The question that needs to be addressed is the creation of an organization that attracts skilled people-- places like MIT, Harvard, UofT, Google and more.

Creating a place of skilled people first starts with training skilled people. Where this begins is the education system, more in particular the secondary education system and to an extent the post secondary system. What is needed is an environment where people can become skilled. Schools don't teach people how to be skilled nor do they make skilled people (or even people that want to be skilled). People organically become what they are, the things that they currently do are learned outside of school. Most people that got good at the things they did so through this route, whether it be programming, music, painting, math, design, whatever. The real winners are the ones that knew what they liked, what they wanted to be good at and went off and did it on their own.

If this is the case, then what is the point of the education system? Most of the information taught is largely useless, atleast in the context of the secondary education system. I did write a small talk about the value of knowledge and it's applicability. If the education system is to have any purpose other than being an elaborate day care of children, it is going to have to train people to be useful. For these reasons alone, a good education system is essential to creating a successful society.

Good Teachers are Essential

How does one create a good education system? Again, it boils down to the people-- you need good teachers (and perhaps, students too... but this is often beyond the scope of teachers). If there is one thing that is worth its weight in gold, its good teachers. In the lifespan of a teacher, a teacher will teach over 1,000 students. That's 1,000 people that this teacher will impress upon. What if these 1,000 people were taught exceptionally well? What if 300 of them went off to become successful people as a result of their teachers? That's what the effect of a good education system could have on a society, assuming these successful people stick around.

How do we get good teachers? Again, this boils down to the problem of attracting the right people; and to attract the right people, you are going to need people and the environment to attract them.