Specialties → interdependency
Macrotrends
Continuing our series on the Macrotrends driving the disconnect between what we learned and what we need now - and in the future. You can find the previous posts in this series at wiseeconomy.substack.com.
For much of the 20th century, increasing specialization was the name of the game. Jobs, degrees, responsibilities got more and more narrow, atomized.
You’re not a doctor, you’re a podiatrist, or an orthopedist specializing in the left shoulder. You’re not a marketer, you’re the person who measures the impact of the social media that someone else created based on a plan that came from somewhere else.
The scope of what one person did in most traditional-style organizations (public or private) shrunk, and things outside of your scope were clearly designated as Not Your Problem.
As in, Don’t Go Outside of Your Lane Or You’re In Trouble.
Jack of all trades, let alone inefficient boundary-muddling, were not welcome.
Specialties not only discouraged looking for the connections between specialties, but they made it easy to ignore what happened outside your space. As a planner, I didn’t have to understand the economics of how people make home buying decisions. As a traditional economic developer, racial equity and dealing with poor people were Someone Else’s Job (phew).
There’s an ease, a confidence in only working on issues that fall within your comfort zone. But it’s confidence in a very flimsy facade.
Now we realize that ignoring the intersections between our specializations often created more problems than we solved. We put people in housing that was not humane. We relegated people to helplessness instead of paying attention and helping them grow.
We created what the economists called externalities, and because the water contamination and flooding and air pollution and homelessness and structural unemployment we had caused fell into that convenient bucket, we could quietly push those impacts to the side and pretend we didn’t see them.
And now we find that the most important research, the most ground-breaking solutions, the biggest Impact, come when people from different specializations get to work on those spaces in between.