Can Bitcoin Lift Botswana?

Known as Botswana’s first Bitcoiner, Akalanani Itirleng believes the borderless cryptocurrency can lift her people—even if it isn’t quite there yet.

“There is still no platform to buy or sell,” Alakanani said, laying out the state of bitcoin in the sparsely populated, sub-Saharan nation over chat. Alakanani logs onto the Internet through her phone, but the service can be spotty. It took us three attempts over the course of a week to finally connect. Undeterred, she’s ecstatic to share her latest success.

Alakanani is a crypto-missionary—Bitcoin is her good news.

This is Africa, after all, rich in resources and poor in just about everything else. It is at once the origin of mankind but also human civilization’s final frontier. With little to look forward to today, the cryptocurrency movement offers Alakanani hope of a better tomorrow.

As a dreamer and a survivor, her story is grounded in maternal resourcefulness and fueled with unabashed idealism. It also begins with tragedy.

When it became clear that her son’s heart condition was beyond the scope of local clinics and her limited finances, she took to the internet in search of medical information and ways to make money.

At least for the uninitiated, the seduction of getting rich quick has been, for better or worse, one of Bitcoin’s foremost attractions. Alakanani’s introduction to the technology then is one of false promises, landing her on websites of questionable integrity that claimed to pay in crypto for clicks, referrals, and surveys.

If Bitcoin expanded the reaches of digital finance, it did so, too, for online scammers. Despite her efforts, she received endless excuses instead of actual payment. It’s hard to say if paying users was ever part of the plan.

Instead, her payoff became the discovery of Bitcoin itself, as Alakanani quickly devoured educational materials, intoxicated by the prospect of a decentralized, peer-to-peer currency controlled by no one and everyone–including, to her immense glee, herself. Though unable to save her son, who passed away last year at the age of four, Alakanani had inadvertently stumbled upon her calling.

Inspired by the potentially liberating force of revolutionary technology, she became her country’s most visible evangelist, creating Facebook groups, producing YouTube videos, andleading local workshops, tireless efforts that would garner the attention of the media andcharitable organizations.

“I believe I now have a total of seven if not eight people who own a few coins including me,” she said, having acquired her first coins through the generous donations of the community. “This helped me to get more people interested and now some are looking for platforms to have more bitcoins and have even taken the bitcoin gospel to others because of the gift that I gave to them.”

“At first, I started with three people who were very keen in knowing more about bitcoins,” she explained. “And I just wanted to share with them so they can feel the love I felt when I received the coins. I knew that once they could feel that, they will want to learn more and at the same time change their lives and have hope for a better future.”

When pressed for specifics, her message is one of individual empowerment, an idea she believes to be fundamentally lacking in her homeland in the face of, in her eyes, ineffective institutions and stifling bureaucracy.

“I believe Bitcoin is the best compared to regular banking—I mean the freedom, the feeling of ownership and control over my finances is beautiful,” she said.

“The bank can question why I have a certain amount of money in my account, a whole lot of bureaucracy and all,” she explained. “Issues of charges that we incur when we transact at banks are always upsetting. They might look small to some people but our statuses are not the same. [With bitcoin], sending money to one’s parents who live far from towns, cities, or villages is much more easy and with no fees.”

Although Botswana’s economy has progressed remarkably over the past 50 years, recent figures aren’t as encouraging. Both poverty and unemployment sit at around 20 percent, and the nation’s inequality ranking is one of the highest in the world.

For Alakanani, the rising tide of cryptocurrencies and the culture of innovation it would bring could raise all ships—by expanding access to banking services and promoting financial independence, which would presumably create jobs, she believes.

“I might not have a lot of bitcoins” Alakanani said, “but it has given me the opportunity to give people an alternative to what they are used to. I mean the government tries with its poverty eradication programs and back to school programs, but we can have independent people who will not depend on government for handouts if we can integrate Bitcoin in Botswana.”

Because for countless Africans, it’s less about having an alternative but any option at all. Botswana’s relative prosperity finds few peers in the sub-Saharan region, which accounts for 82% of poverty worldwide. A major contributor is the dramatic prevalence of the unbanked—326 million in total—whose inability to access modern savings, lending, and payment services essentially excludes them from participating in the global economy.

Instead of established institutions, the system’s outcast rely on informal means of borrowing and saving. “Unbanked people already use financial services—lots of them,” said financial expert Brigit Helms in her interview with The Guardian. “These options are convenient, but also fundamentally insecure, unpredictable, and often costly.”

Bitcoin, in the eyes of Alakanani, could provide those left out with precisely the kinds of services they need most: a convenient way to send, receive, and store money. The problem, of course, is that technology will never be a panacea for deeply rooted societal issues—at least on its own.

Africa’s structural limitations, for instance, extend to Bitcoin as well—only 13 percent of the Botswana’s population has regular internet access. And with nowhere to spend or trade her digital cash, Alakanani’s stash is largely irrelevant. Outside of budding interest in South Africa, home to the only cryptocurrency exchange, adoption across the continent is predictably nonexistent.

Stringent regulations haven’t helped, stymying the occasional crypto-initiative from taking root. Then there’s the brutal economics of reality. Silicon Valley’s practice of betting on the speculative future of untested technology simply isn’t the kind of luxury afforded to the majority of Africans fighting just to get by.

But that doesn’t mean technological progress can’t help, exemplified best by M-Pesa. Launched in 2007 by Kenya-based Safaricom, the text-powered banking system has been a resounding success by adapting to the needs of the people. While a mere 18 percent of the population is online in sub-Saharan Africa, mobile penetration is at an impressive 86 percent and rising.

A 2010 study by the University of Maryland identified increased money circulation, business expansion, greater employment, and improved wealth security as prominent economic effects of M-Pesa’s widespread adoption. “By lowering the costs of money transfer,” writes Robert Hall for World Bank, “M-Pesa has helped to increase market activity, especially outside cities, and that trend will continue.”

In 2011, M-Pesa partnered with Western union, creating a global network that extends to 95 countries—allowing the billions in overseas remittances to flow quickly to the people that need it most. Safaricom would expand the service to include the savings and loan platform M-Shwari in late 2012. The program’s overwhelming impact prompted Vodafone to bring it to Europe.

Most significantly, M-Pesa opens the doors to financial institutions keen on expanding their customer base in the developing world.

Having proven what’s possible, the network’s limitations—such as relatively high fees—is an invitation for proactive competition.

It’s here that Alakanani’s grand vision may realistically come to fruition—where institutions and innovation come together, rather than in spite of each other. In other words, Bitcoin might not make a difference on its own but through the change it inspires.

While nifty, new technology in and of itself isn’t particularly useful, the integration of crypto-innovations could unlock and expand the potential of existing infrastructure. Digitizing financial platforms would allow faster and cheaper payments across an internationally compatible network, providing financial institutions with the means to create an agile distribution platform to efficiently serve the region.

According to a recent industry report by Accenture, “leveraging the lower cost-to-serve capabilities enabled by the technology-driven transformation of their operating and distribution models” allows forward-looking banks to reach previously inaccessible markets, like “the hundreds of millions of people who remain outside the scope of traditional banking services.”

Subsequently, the hundreds of millions of unbanked in the region represent an enormously profitable yet untapped market. If the region saw the same kind of developments that Kenyans have seen with M-Pesa, the total revenues from digital payments have been estimated to jump from $6.6 to $16 billion dollars, according to a recent report by McKinsey.

The enterprising have already been testing the waters, like Google and its prepaid card serviceBeba, which provides Kenyans a more convenient way to pay bus fares. For the people of Africa, the arrival of outside ventures will only increase the accessibility and affordability of financial services.

Of course, with true believes like Akalanani continuing to spread the virtues of Bitcoin’s grassroots appeal, development on the other end of the spectrum could yet make a meaningful impact—but persistent barriers remain. Kipochi, an early attempt to marry mobile and BTC through M-Pesa, was abruptly terminated—allegedly because decentralized currencies were seen as a source of competition—according to the wallet’s developer, Pelle Braendgaard.

Ultimately, Kipochi’s setback highlights the tribulations of more entrepreneurial efforts. As such, Bitcoin’s presence in Botswana, and Africa as a whole, remains more symbolic than economic.

Alakanani, however, remains steadfast. “I still hold to the belief that many lives can be changed with Bitcoin,” she confided with us over her wobbly connection. “It gives people an opportunity to change their lives and others.”

5 Crazy Payment Practices We Accept As Totally Normal

Humans are a curious lot, with our incredible ability to adapt to nearly any situation—good or bad. It’s a useful trait most of the time—such as when you have a mysterious stench emanating from your apartment. No big deal—it’s only a matter of time before you’ll stop noticing it completely. By design, our brains will numb us to even the most pungent odors in the name of comfort. But this persistent capacity to ignore signs of potentially deeper issues can just as well breed complacency. Because whether or not you’re aware of it, your apartment still stinks.

This rings particularly true in the payments space—where we’ve been conditioned to believe that everything’s just dandy when, in fact, the status quo sort of, well, stinks. In today’s world of instant access and on demand, money always seems to require three business days or more to reach its destination. And some of the stuff we do and accept isn’t merely inconvenient or nonsensical, it’s downright reckless, exposing us to pervasive fraud that costs the industry hundreds of billions of dollars every year (and rising).

With the rest of the world—from media all the way to commerce—accelerates into the future, isn’t it time we re-calibrated our expectations for consumer finance within the context of the digital age? As always, the road to recovery begins by acknowledging the existence of a problem. Here’s a list to get you started. Go ahead, take a whiff.

1. Why isn’t there an app for that? 

We live in an age where our most prevalent personal accessories—from our cameras to our iPods—have been assimilated by that always-connected computer in your pocket. But while you can beam freshly recorded 4K video to the cloud and digitally hail a cab as you trade your equity account on-the-go, our smartphones are glaringly inadequate at serving our daily payment needs. There’s an app for just about everything—except paying for your morning cup of joe.

Even as our phones get smarter, our wallets are still pretty dumb, carrying our cash and, more often than not, an assortment of cards—the debit card, the SkyMiles card, and the ol’ American Express, for when you feel like showing off or relaxing at that exclusive airport lounge. Shopping with the girls? Better bring your Gap card (and probably the Macy’s card, too) to get 10 percent off your entire purchase. In all, we carry around 1.5 billion credit cards in the US alone—reminiscent of the days we lugged around binders full of compact discs, in case you want to play your second favorite jam of all time. Actually, scratch that—you left it in the car stereo.

Indeed, apps and services are beginning to pop up to address our mobile payment woes. San Francisco-based Coin, for instance, promises to consolidate all your plastic into a single device, and apps like LevelUp do support real-life payments for goods and services (including coffee)—but only at participating retailers. As in-development or still developing products, we’re a long way off from having an all-encompassing solution that would free up a pocket and allow us to sit more comfortably in chairs. Until then, we’re stuck with our wallets, our cards, and our cash—that is, if you happen have cash handy. If not, there’s always the ATM. Enjoy the fee.

2. Why are we still signing so many receipts?

Everyone has one of those friends, the one who audaciously signed a receipt with a smiley face instead of their John Hancock, reprimanded, at worst, with a patronizing glance—if the rebellious act is noticed at all. It’s an overused bit of performance art with a simple message: “Come on people, what’s the point of it all?”

You might surmise that your carelessly scribbled autographs somehow pertain to your personal benefit or financial protection—maybe to verify the authenticity of your latest Starbucks run. It’s a good guess, but you’d be well off the mark. In reality, it has nothing to do with you at all and everything to do with who picks up the tab in the case of fraud. If a restaurant can’t produce a signed receipt, then they’re on the hook. Otherwise, the credit card company foots the bill.

For all intents and purposes, it’s a system that’s ineffective and arbitrary—not to mention wasteful, ensuring the senseless demise of 10 million trees.

With respect to both security and the environment, Europe transitioned to smarter cards a decade ago by integrating chip-and-PIN verification. These chips are more difficult than magnetic strips to clone, and the PIN adds another hurdle for potential fraudsters, unlike the paper receipts merchants and banks rarely subject to any kind of scrutiny. Fortunately, signed receipts will officially become obsolete in 2015, when the same tech is adopted stateside. Which begs the question: “What took so long?”

3. Why is money so darn slow (and why can’t we bank on Sunday)?

Spiffy services like PayPal and Venmo provide users with the illusion of instant payments, but in reality, your account balance is essentially a meaningless number until you actually withdraw your funds—which can still take a week. What gives? Lacking a universal, standardized protocol for money transfers, financial institutions rely on centralized networks, like Automated Clearing House (ACH) in the US, which typically settles transfers in 1-2 days—a window that allows for things like transaction reversals and general risk mitigation.

While undeniably reliable, ACH is, in theory, slower than the centuries-old technology it was meant to replace when the electronic network was conceived back in the 70s. Thanks to secure image-processing techniques, paper checks can be delivered instantaneously and, in many cases, processed by banks the very same day. Operating only during regular banking hours, ACH acts as an industry-wide bottleneck. No matter how state-of-the-art a company’s own platform is, the level of service and kinds of products they can offer is ultimately constrained by the system’s underlying plumbing.

Other countries have their own proprietary networks, like England, which offers same-day service, and Mexico, where payments can be settled in minutes. ACH, too, has plans for an eventual real-time platform. But on a global scale, the closed nature of each country’s respective network means that financial intermediaries and workarounds are required to connect these fragmented markets.

Internationally, interbank transactions are predominantly communicated via the SWIFT network. But SWIFT is merely a messaging service—meaning that if the banks don’t hold matching accounts in both regions, settlement time can exceed 2-3 business days (also taking into account varying time zones and regulatory policies). This is especially problematic for lesser-developed markets with poorly-defined payment pathways, necessitating convoluted routes and middlemen, further adding to time and cost.

4. Why do we voluntarily provide complete strangers access to our personal finances?

Whether it’s dining out or shopping online, we are, according to Andreessen, frolicking with total strangers without a condom—and without a hint of hesitation. In bitcoin terms, it’s the equivalent of giving out your private key. We’ve been conditioned to accept as normal what’s wildly unsafe—both for the sake of convenience and the lack of a better option. While your waiter will happily accept cash, your favorite Amazon retailer isn’t nearly as flexible.

That we don’t explicitly see the cost of fraud likely adds to our nonchalance. But while consumers feel protected, merchants take a hardy beating—about $190 billion a year and growing. Far from irrelevant, those losses are implicitly accounted for in the MSRP of our goods and services.

Invented decades before the Web, credit cards weren’t designed with digital in mind. To accommodate their technological limitations, we expose ourselves to a persistent vulnerability. As fundamentally flawed solution, their ubiquitous use isn’t just questionable, it’s downright reckless. The recent Target hack that exposed 40 million credit card numbers was yet another extravagant reminder of this fact—our ongoing love affair with plastic is easy, profitable pickings for even moderately resourceful scammers.

5. Why do we still use cash (and coins)? 

Whether for its tradition and history, properties of anonymity, or that classic, visceral feeling of security and ownership that a stack of fresh Benjamins elicits—cash is still king, responsible for 85 percent of retail transactions globally.

But our preference for paper (and semi-precious metals) comes with a price. Both pennies and nickels cost $100 million more to make than they’re worth, and the US could save $150 billion every year if we bucked cash entirely. (Incidentally, a digital solution would also provide central bankers a more efficient and robust toolkit regarding monetary policy—without having to worry about issues like zero or negative interest rates).

Plus, money in the classic sense readily enables criminal activity—whether it’s money laundering or counterfeiting (one of North Korea’s more profitable pastimes). And from a practical perspective, it’s incompatible with cyberspace—where 92 percent of money now lives worldwide. By most accounts, cash is better suited in our history books than our wallets.

Marx thought that labor created value–that the value of any good was the sum of the labor used to make it. Intuitively, it makes sense. Things that take more labor to produce tend to sell at higher prices, and the common correlation naturally leads to a connection. But it also leads to frustration. If laborers are responsible for all the value of goods, then why are all the laborers so much poorer than…say…their managers? Is it right that so few should profit so mightily off the broken backs of a multitude?

The answer, of course, is no.

Although Marx’s angst flows quite logically from his fundamental understanding of value, this understanding, however intuitive, suffers from fundamental flaws. Value cannot be objectively calculated from labor. It’s decided by the market.

Value is subjective.

Thought experiment time!

You live in a busy city, a metropolis, and all conveniences of modern life lie at your disposal. One day on the way to the gym, a stranger walks up to you and offers you choice: an ornately crafted Faberge egg or a two-liter of Lipton Ice Tea. Suspend disbelief. The choice is easy. “I’ll take the million-dollar egg please.” Exquisitely fashioned, its million-dollar value seems appropriate…and certainly greater than a jug of unsweetened leaf water.

Now visualize this same choice in a different context. Instead of a bustling city, you find yourself in a broiling, barren wasteland. Dozens of miles from any civilization, your chances of survival are slim to none. But they’d improve by a good margin with some supplies. Necessities. Leaf water is starting to sound awful valuable.

Why did you flip flop? Because value doesn’t have to do with labor. Value is the result of a relationship between supply and demand. In the city, the egg was more valuable because the demand for the unique artifact was so much higher than the amount that could be offered. You can buy tea anywhere. Faberge eggs can only be found in museums, government vaults, and private collections. Along with the egg’s limited supply, there’s substantial demand, the combination of which catapults it into the museum/private collection level.

In the desert, you’d be wishing that egg were actual yoke and white. While the supply remains limited, demand drops to zero. The tea is quite a different story. Like I said, value is subjective.

Value’s subjectivity comes causes real problems when it comes to currency. Especially storing currency. Especially storing fiat currency.

Along with being a means of exchange made of fungible, divisible, scarce units, providing a store of value is vital function of money. Transportable, durable, and dependable, good money makes wealth savable and manageable. But fiat currency’s storage capabilities aren’t exactly the best. In 1912, 10 US dollars could buy you what 243 could buy you today. Which means if you stored away the modern-day equivalent of 243 dollars in 1912, your 243 modern-day dollars worth of work would be do what 10 dollars does now.

Why the dramatic loss of value? Like I said, I’m no economist, and inflation is a complex topic, but one of the most obvious culprits is our monetary policy. Dilution of value is inevitable whenever dollars become less scarce, and dollars become less scarce when, say, the US Federal Reserve introduces billions of dollars into the money supply via Quantitative Easing.

But let’s not digress into politics. The point is fiat currency makes wealth storage risky, especially considering their average life span clocks in at 27 years. Place all your eggs in that basket at your peril.

And this is precisely where Bitcoin comes in.

(This is the end of part 3. Part 4 next week).

This wasn’t always the case.  For most of my life I lumped money into the rather broad and definitely indefinite “things of this world” category.  You can go ahead and roll your eyes at the hokey idealism, but I’ll defend my intentions to this day.   I dismissed the significance of money because I never understood it as the incredible technology that it was–most likely because no one had ever presented it to me as incredible technology.  Instead, money was cursed with the vague “root of all of evil” stigma, so I never had any incentive to understand what was, to my understanding, only a road to perdition.

While money can certainly get the best of us–as Greece is more than aware–the function it performs is essential to growth and progress on this planet.  Money may not make the world go round…but, to be honest, it gets close.

Try to imagine a world without money.  How would it work?  A society devoid of a common currency would most likely rely on bartering, i.e. “my cow for your car,” to do business.  This may conjure Utopian images of peasants pleasantly trading bushels of succulent produce for barrels of fresh beer and farm-churned butter, but after the rosy red glow of fantasy fades from your mind’s eye, the practical impossibilities set in.

Bartering is a fine means of exchange, but its limitations are legion.  Let’s say you a fisherman.  You work 6am to 6pm in a bay throwing and retrieving nets for your hourly wages, which are, in this culture, not paid in dollars but weighed in fish.  Sure, your family will certainly get their Omega-3, but the needs of a growing household undoubtedly exceed Halibut for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.  Your daughter needs braces, your son a new baseball hat.  But no matter how plentiful your daily catches are, you can’t really purchase dental care or sports equipment unless both the dentist and the shopkeeper are seriously hungry for that Halibut.  Sure, you could work out some sort of deal, but the difficulty of these arrangements becomes apparent when you consider the planning that would be necessary to cater to all the goods and service providers whose goods and services you need.  Perhaps the dentist doesn’t need fish.  He wants gold for his fillings. Maybe the shopkeeper’s a vegan.  He’d take Broccoli instead.  Now instead of going directly to the producer, you’d need to track down any number of secondary and tertiary producers just to pay for simple services.

Bartering only really works when there is a coincidence of wants.  That is to say, when each party in a trade wants what the other has.  In any other case, you’re going to have to do some real legwork.

Money solves this problem.  By providing a common unit of exchange–something that everyone wants–money allows you to buy directly from the producer without any need for auxiliary trades.

All kinds of materials have been used as money.  Precious metals, stones, feathers…the list goes on.  For most of human history, money was either made from a commodity (like gold or silver) or tied to one (like a note redeemable for gold or silver).  In the US, this relationship between commodity and currency was known as the gold standard, but the American government, along with the rest of the world, has abandoned this practice in favor of a purely note-based dollar–a fiat currency.  Fiat currencies are intrinsically worthless, which means that outside its use as a means of exchange, it has no real or alternate value.   Unlike commodity-backed forms of money, fiat currencies derive their worth purely from the faith of those who use it.

In other words, the US dollar is valuable because we believe in it.

While their value is essentially founded in our faith, fiat currencies do have certain qualities that support that perception:

Scarce: USD, like any money whatever, can only maintain value if it is scarce.  While a dollar may be no more intrinsically valuable than a sheet of white paper, appearance sets them apart.  Dollars are hard to reproduce.  Extremely hard.  After all, we wouldn’t have much reason to trust any form of currency anyone could copy at will, therefore counterfeit resistance–or scarcity security–is a must for money.

Fungible: This is a weird word, but the concept is straightforward: every dollar should be exchangeable for every other.  Units that represent the same value should look and feel like they are worth the same amount.  You can see why stones and feathers would have difficulty passing this test, as their inherent uniqueness butts heads with efficient trade.

Divisible: Stones and feathers would have problems here too.  And divisibility is yet another point of failure for the barter system.  Imagine you were a brain surgeon in our hypothetical bartertopia.  While in a world with money, your job may put you ahead of the pack, in this universe the high value of your craft would make trade incredibly difficult.

After a long day of tumor removals, you head down to the local pub to buy a beer.  But instead of money, the only thing you have to offer the bartender would be…tumor removals.  In the off chance he has need of such an operation, you’d at least have bargaining chips, but unless you want a tumor removal’s worth of beer, you don’t have much in way of an ideal trade.

“If only,” you think to yourself, “there were some common, divisible unit of exchange that would allow me to use only a portion of the value of my labor towards anything I would like to purchase.”

Indeed. That would make things far more convenient.

(This is the end of part 2. Part 3 coming soon).

That said, I’ll take a calculated risk: all eyes are on cryptocurrency.

Bitcoin. Never has cryptography been so controversial. To some, it represents long-awaited, world-changing innovation. To others, the digital dollar is nothing but an elaborate hoax engineered to coax idle dollars from the wallets of the gullible–a giant Ponzi scheme, to be precise. In fact, if you enter “Ponzi scheme” into Google, “Ponzi scheme bitcoin” is the third suggested search.

Ouch.

Connected to prostitution, drugs, hired guns, and money laundering–mostly through association to the seedy eBay of the internet underworld, Silk Road–Bitcoin has been framed as the Charlie Sheen of cryptocurrencies. Everyone’s got an opinion. Strong opinions. Black and white opinions…with maybe a hint of gray. Maybe.

I got into Bitcoin for philosophical reasons. I’m a libertarian, and, once familiar with the mechanics of Bitcoin, you’ll find the reasons behind my interest become quite clear. But I’m not going to get into that just yet.

Philosophy comes later.

When I got interested in bitcoin, I got really, really interested. So I did what any good autodidact (self-educator) would do: I went straight to Wikipedia. While I certainly found the information interesting, I was determined to fully understand the ins and outs. As helpful as Wikipedia is, for grasping a concept as radical as Bitcoin, it just would not do. So I read and watched and bought books and read some more, and while each piece offered excellent insight, no one source offered the complete explanation I sought.

So, I’ve decided to distill the results of my labor into a concise–and hopefully helpful–series of blog posts on

Bitcoin. But the posts won’t be limited to Bitcoin, because my journey certainly wasn’t. I’ll also discuss Ripple, a brand new payment system that’s quietly taken the market by storm. If you’re interested by all the buzz surrounding Bitcoin, Ripple, and cryptocurrency in general, then stay tuned. I’ll try to help cut through the hype and get down brass tacks.

(This is the end of Part 1. Expect Part 2 tomorrow).

But that’s not the catch-22 part. The real suck sets in when you realize that to really compete, you’re probably going to have to specialize, but those upper degrees, they take much time and more money, and the needs of our economy fluctuate so quickly that what’s necessary now could easily be passé in 6 or more years. This is coincidentally terrible, because that’s just about as much time as you need to get that degree to compete.

Alright, I’m going to think out loud here. It should be duly noted that I am in no way an expert on anything that I likely comment on…but whatever–such is the nature of blogs.

Back to the point. What should education look like in an age like ours? Rapidly evolving economies require agility, but all that competition requires excessive qualifications. My layperson estimation spots a conflict, so I’ll put my layperson knowledge to a solution.

There are, at this moment, 3000 janitors in the states with PhDs, which tells me there is a definite disconnect between what our educational system creates and what the market needs (or thinks that they need, anyway). I don’t think the solution is more doctorates. (Clearly, the there’s at least some oversaturation going on here, unless all 3000 have 8 year diplomas in the custodial arts). Those lengthy programs certainly develop a honed skill-set, but that toolbox can seem so specialized that it, in reality, often closes more doors than it opens.

I won’t belabor my thesis: I’d suggest colleges stress degree programs that develop entrepreneurial abilities, critical thinking, and comfort with tech. They could be short, and they should be student driven. No doubt, specialization will play a part in the process–my ideal school places students in the driver’s seat–but the foundation should remain.

There is just no way education should take as long as it does. For almost everyone, the first two years of college are high school part 2. Those general ed credits are eerily similar to our junior and senior years, which means that most are into their twenties before they even begin to take the classes most pertinent to their careers…and almost 26 by the time they hit the job market with a “competitive” degree. Should you discover, to your gut-wrenching dismay, that what you’ve been slaving for, sleepless nights and all, is completely lost in whatever HR stacks your resume finds itself buried in, you’re truly in too deep. More school is not a realistic option. Your present debt already robs you of whatever peace you attempt to muster at night, and the thought of another unmarketable degree to your name and yet more debt is a distinct possibility. You could get a job, but it would probably be entry level–but you always wanted to be a barista, right? It’s tragedy Shakespeare would dare not write.

Ok, that’s bull crap. He wrote Titus Andronicus.

Look, I haven’t sorted all this out. I write this blog in an hour with little to no preparation of any kind. All I’m suggesting is that shorter programs could and should be developed that instill all those necessary qualities for success, while leaving the specialization to independent learning and company-specific education. Tests like those Coinbase

uses could filter the field, giving everyone with sharp mind and dedication a fighting chance.

Maybe I’m idealistic–or ignorant. I’m probably a good mix of both. But I don’t think we’re doing this education/career planning/recruiting thing the right way, and I think the times demand a mod.

Bad joke.

Moving on.

While I do see that the application of certain fields of study may be a stretch for the more pragmatic, I feel like those art history majors deserve some credit for what they are actually learning and–hopefully–learning quite well: analytical and communication skills.

The internet not only changed how we learn, it also created a whole new world of possibilities for those enamored with the most under-appreciated skill set of all: writing.  Never before in history have businesses required the amount of media content that they do now.  Every store, shop, and market, every restaurant you go to and movie theater you visit now maintains multiple streams of content.  Much of it is written work, which means work for writers.  This will only become more true as society waxes completely digital, and I feel that the hiring field is ripe with unemployed, potentially revolutionary talent in this field.  Honestly, humanities students seem custom-fitted to this emergent need.  English classes, and art classes of all kinds, are a boot camp for analysis and written response.  And as far as I can tell, these are precisely the kinds of skills that make for an excellent content developer, social media marketer, PR professional, etc.

Worthless degree?

I think the problem lies on both ends here.  Too many of us are waiting tables trying to be Melville, when we should be looking into SEO and the nuts of bolts of writing in the digital age.  Hesitancy to be anything other than a teacher and fixation on publishing in a world that has left much of that industry behind can fashion us into time capsules instead of professionals, and, in the economic position we currently live in, lack of imagination kills.

It’s not all us though.  If recruiters really want to get the most talented candidates possible, they don’t just need to broaden their net, they need a different net altogether.

Let me illustrate.  I recently applied for a job at a west coast currency exchange that employed a clever method of screening applicants.   Instead of being a degree-based, background intensive process, the application was a test.  A mix of a task-specific questionnaire, a writing evaluation, and an IQ assessment, it was a truly democratic experience.  And certainly the most enjoyable application so far.  I believe this kind of smart assessment will become the norm as the value of an open approach to recruiting becomes more apparent.

(This is the end of part 2. Part 3 next week).

This sobering situation becomes even more cold-water-wake-up shocking when those unfortunate multitude who didn’t pursue a career in business, engineering, the medical field or law are taken into account.  Yes, I am speaking to you, sociology, psychology, philosophy, English, and history majors.  Look, it’s not as if I’m pointing any fingers.  I have an MA in English, so definitely in the same boat here.

But this is not yet another blog post wailing over the sad sad state of the economy.  This is, instead, a defense of our degrees.

I say there is no such thing as a worthless degree.  In fact, I will go on to say that the degrees we have earned have great value and will only becoming increasingly valuable as time progresses.  But I won’t stop there.  I’ll even make the claim that our whole idea of career education and the hiring process needs an upgrade.

You may scoff.  Fine.  Scoff.  But give me some time to lay out my rationale.

A very magical thing happened in the nineties.  The internet.  And although it’s roots extend back to the 1950s, it wasn’t until the end of the 20th century that the revolution began in earnest.  It is in this revolution that our hope lies.  Before the internet, things were different.  Knowledge now only a google away was then at least a 10 minute car ride and 30 minute book search ordeal.   This may seem like I’m stating the obvious–and perhaps I am–but I don’t think the implications of the obvious I’m stating have truly been brought to bear on popular sentiment, job recruiting practices, or our own self-esteem.

In general, people learn to do what they do for their job…at their job.  Our specific educations, while indicative of our degree of knowledge of some body of knowledge, shouldn’t be an easy HR sorting device for quick ins and easy outs.  Instead, our scholarly pursuits should be used to determine how quickly we can master information, adapt to situations, and achieve excellence.   The particulars are largely superfluous.  I’m not telling recruiters to hire art history majors to fill an exec vacancy, but what I am saying is that we need to take a deeper look at what really matters in education and what skills are really required for success.

When it comes down to it, motivation, creativity, and communication skills are the main indicators of success–not an MBA.  In a world where the answer to any question I might have is always at my finger tips, it’s my ability to quickly understand and apply that information that counts–not words on my diploma.

We’re not in a paper world anymore.  The pace is digital.  And the time when planning your degree by what the market will need 6 years from now is no longer the time in which we live.   The times requires an agile approach to education, but our education methods and recruiting practices have to catch up.

(This is the end of part 1.  Part 2 coming Thursday)

I don’t know where I was going with that.

When I was in school–public school, private school, homeschool, whatever–learning was often, if not always, facilitated in the same way.  The teacher chooses the subject matter; the teacher teaches the subject matter; the teacher assigns work based on the subject matter; and the student, me, absorbs it all and does the work.  For many people, the system works pretty well.   Hell, it worked just fine for me.  I love structure.  My tasks were clearly defined–and the methods too. The rewards?  In principle, they never changed.  Do what was asked of me, and I received a gold star, or a big number, or, if I was very lucky, a reassuring wink.  I slaved for my gold stars, numbers, and winks.

I became an excellent task performer.

The problem is, to really succeed at the job search, and much of life, task performing just isn’t enough.  I have to be an entrepreneur.  The CEO of a company of one. The problems I face job hunting are unlimited and undefined.  No one assigns me any specific tasks.  I choose.  And often, no matter how hard I try, no matter how good my application is or strong my resume looks, it will fail.  And I, accustomed to a world of winks and gold stars, will feel like a failure.

But here’s the thing: failure is commonplace–actually obligatory–in life.  Yet failure is grounds for depression in school.

Students are largely rewarded for the safe bet.  An overly-ambitious project or an assignment were the student violated the boundaries set by the instructor are often met with punishment in some form or fashion–no wink for you, so to speak.  And this training, while it certainly cultivates caution, also can instill a debilitating, play it safe, expect the immediate reward, perspective.

My career is ultimately my responsibility, but uneasy lays the crown inherited suddenly after graduation.  I am used to an authority guiding my hand, choosing my task, and I am also used to my efforts being met with timely rewards and punishments–and the lack thereof leaves me confused…sometimes depressed.

I believe that much of the education system is due for a change.  The world developing before us is freer then any before, and it’s high time our teaching caught up with what cannot be taught: self-motivation and determination.   Not just the job search, but much of life, requires it.

Applying sucks because it’s a problem of a kind wholly unlike what’s simulated in lecture hall and homework.  No one but I can really decide where I should apply the bulk of my efforts, which companies I should choose out of however many, or even which career path I should follow.  The specific answers to many of these problems are not only unknown, but cannot be known, and that’s unsettling to a man who had the most gold stars in his kindergarten class.  But while I could sit and bemoan my position, disturbed by the alien nature of what’s before me, I could always take another perspective and look at it as the most exciting equation I’ve ever tried to solve.

I think another attitude is more appropriate–not to mention more helpful–than the moping panic that I am tempted to fall into.  I should be excited.  For the first time in my life, I choose the goal, and I choose the means.  There are no fixed rules, and there are endless possibilities. And, if I look at it this way, applying isn’t as scary as it is thrilling.  It’s a challenge to be as creative as I possibly can be, to set my own goals and be unwavering.  And, most of all, it’s a challenge that grows my self-respect in ways I’ve never before experienced.

So now, while there are parts of the application process that will always suck, I do deeply appreciate it.  It’s the school I never had, and the teacher I always needed.

Then I graduated college, and I entered the job wilderness…er, market.  Dear lord…what a weird transition.  Perhaps I had been buried in my Shakespeare for one too many nights, but the whole reality of the task never really hit me until, well, it became my reality.  I scoured the web for every company or school I thought could benefit from my skills, but the magnitude of the problem overwhelmed.  Each application was so time consuming, with so many facets and rabbit holes.  All the factors I wanted to know dangled out of my reach: what kinds of applicants am I facing?  Who would actually be looking at my application?  Are my credentials strong enough to merit all the time and effort I’m putting in?  These and many more questions would float around my head, taunting me with their unanswerability.  To make matters worse, at every turn my mind seemed determined to keep me from focusing on the task at hand, while every time I turned from the task at hand, my mind would pester me with what it had been distracting me from—namely, the task at hand.  And the result of all this was, among other things, the occasional mental shutdown, which is a formal way of saying panic.

I don’t know if this is an experienced unique to humanities graduates, but it certainly struck me like a bat between the eyes.  Being an introspective type, I’ve put in  some good hours trying to figure out why it freaked me out as much as it did.  And I think now I know why: my education.

This is certainly a generalization, but I’ll use it anyway, the mission of the whole educational system is twofold:

1. Provide you with foundational knowledge.

2. Prepare you for a career.

While its overall success at the former goal is debatable, I think its performance of the latter is often seriously lacking.  And I believe this is (at least partially) a product of fundamental aspects of teaching tradition: rewards, punishments, and teacher led learning.

This is the end of part 1 on this topic. To be continued on Sunday.