Chronic Murmuring

Age and Work

Russell Roberts (scroll down to March 24, "Child Labor" (he doesn't have permalinks), mentions how the technological shifts occuring in the marketplace are affecting the age at which workers do work. The Internet, for instance, for a variety of reasons, seems to now be a classic case in point. Whereas three to four years ago, a person could make a great living designing webpages for firms, now that work is going overseas and/or to teenagers. It's not uncommon to find the excellent web designers who are 14 years old, or even younger.

Bruce Weinberg and David Galenson have a JPE article entitled "Age and the Quality of Work: The Case of Modern American Painters" (registration required) that lends some insight into some changes we're seeing in the relationship between age, human capital, experience and one's best work. They take two distinct periods in 20th century art - abstract expressionism (of whom Jackson Pollack is best known) and the later pop art (of whom And Warhol is best known), conceptual art, etc. movements - and identifies the average ages at which the each movement did their best work (as measured by the prices the paintings commanded in auctions at Sotheby's and Christy's). What they found was that the best work done by the earlier abstract expressionist painters peaked at ages greater than those in the following movements. The abstract expressionists did their best work when they were older, whereas the pop art, conceptual art, etc. artists peaked at much younger ages.

Weinberg and Galenson use this evidence to support the theory that certain types of work will have higher returns that differ depending on the worker's age. Certain types of work are much more craft-like, wherein experience and education play an important role in increasing one's "productivity" whereas other types of work are arguably more conceptual, and therefore do not benefit as much from extensive experience. It is said that the best work done by mathematicians is at the average of 27, and I believe that something similar can be said of poets, theoretical physicists and the like. But, for other types of work, the worker accumulates a certain amount of human capital over the life-cycle that therefore increases their productivity and enhances the quality of their output. The abstract expressionists, while to the untrained eye, might seem to be a more conceptual bunch, but the truth is that Pollack and his informal group had spent years perfecting their own unique style. Warhol, on the other hand who used a silk screening method to transfer pop culture images, did not even himself participate in the actual construction of his art. He used an assembly line to do it, and his actual input was limited to the concept he was after and the selection of the actual images themselves.

It's possible that what Roberts notes about child labor and the Internet is something along these lines. There may be something inherent about web design which makes the peak age at which designers do their best work very young. In other words, the Mincer-like increasing but diminishing returns to education and experience may not apply in certain industries where the work relies on this kind of "conceptual" way of working. If that is true, then it calls into question whether there is much value in getting a college education if one is a web designer. Those years spent getting a college degree may in fact be wasteful, from the perspective of one's output, if in fact there is a window of time when one's best work can be done.