My theory of human evolution says there are mechanisms that produce diversity of skills and knowledge. These mechanisms evolved because diversity of goods and services is crucial to a healthy economy. Human diversity generates economic diversity — the person who likes to paint becomes an artist, the person who likes to make things becomes an engineer. These differences are crucial because they allow trade. If everyone made the same things, there could be no trade and no gains from specialization. The more diversity, the better. This is the opposite of the way variation is viewed in statistics. A statistician thinks of variation in measurement as “error” — something to be reduced, perhaps by averaging. Variation is everywhere, of course; you can think of it as something to be encouraged or discouraged.

Human nature encourages diversity. You can build (a) institutions that encourage, benefit from, or at least accept human diversity or (b) institutions that discourage it. The former will work vastly better than the latter because the latter are always fighting human nature. It is the difference between swimming with the current and swimming against it. This is the heart of my criticism of higher education: It is anti-human-nature. It is anti-human-nature because every student in a class is treated the same. Every student is expected to learn the same things and is measured using the same yardstick. Such classes ignore diversity and try to reduce diversity (every student is supposed to learn the same stuff, thus making their brains more similar). They are ignoring and fighting human nature.

When I told Sarah Kapoor this critique, she recommended First, Break All the Rules: What the World’s Greatest Managers Do Differently (1999) by Marcus Buckingham and Curt Coffman. “You’ll like it,” she said. She was right. At the heart of what distinguishes better managers from worse managers, say the authors, is that the better managers have this “revolutionary insight”:

People don’t change that much. Don’t waste time trying to put in what was left out. [In other words, don’t try to make your employees identical.] Try to draw out what was left in.

In other words: 1. Start by accepting diversity. 2. Try to use it to advantage.

Better managers achieve better results, defined all sorts of ways, than worse managers. The author’s conclusions are based on a vast amount of research done by the Gallup Organization.

Christmas edition. American Idol edition.

My theory of human evolution (paper, talk) is that our brains changed in several ways to build healthy economies — in particular, to increase specialization, trade, and technical know-how. For example, collectors and connoisseurs pay more for finely-made things than the rest of us; the extra payment helps skilled craftsmen advance their art. Collectors and connoisseurs come to value small improvements, I believe, through side-by-side comparisons. Obviously side-by-side comparisons help us notice small improvements; it’s the predicted hedonic change that’s interesting.

After listening to Jordin Sparks sing “Woman in Love” on American Idol last night, I wondered what other singers had done with it. YouTube was happy to help.

Jordin Sparks

Barbra Streisand

Liz McClarnon

Lili Ivanova

Young Divas

Leticia

Shiela Rodriguez

Regine Velasquez

After you listen to several of these performances, I predict you will respond more strongly — more fully? — to future performances. The better ones will bring you more pleasure, the worse ones more pain. You will be willing to pay more for the better ones. Saul Sternberg has also been interested in the effect of side-by-side musical comparisons.

Christmas edition of my theory.