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Occupational Licensing Blunts Competition and Boosts Inequality (economist.com)
Occupational licensing -- the practice of regulating who can do what jobs -- has been on the rise for decades. In 1950 one in 20 employed Americans required a licence to work. By 2017 that had risen to more than one in five. From a report: The trend partly reflects an economic shift towards service industries, in which licences are more common. But it has also been driven by a growing number of professions successfully lobbying state governments to make it harder to enter their industries. Most studies find that licensing requirements raise wages in a profession by around 10%, probably by making it harder for competitors to set up shop.
Lobbyists justify licences by claiming consumers need protection from unqualified providers. In many cases this is obviously a charade. Forty-one states license makeup artists, as if wielding concealer requires government oversight. Thirteen license bartending; in nine, those who wish to pull pints must first pass an exam. Such examples are popular among critics of licensing, because the threat from unlicensed staff in low-skilled jobs seems paltry. Yet they are not representative of the broader harm done by licensing, which affects crowds of more highly educated workers like Ms Varnam. Among those with only a high-school education, 13% are licensed. The figure for those with postgraduate degrees is 45%.
[...] One way of telling that many licences are superfluous is the sheer variance in the law across states. About 1,100 occupations are regulated in at least one state, but fewer than 60 are regulated in all 50, according to a report from 2015 by Barack Obama's White House. Yet a handful of high-earning professions are regulated everywhere. In particular, licences are more common in legal and health-care occupations than in any other.
Lobbyists justify licences by claiming consumers need protection from unqualified providers. In many cases this is obviously a charade. Forty-one states license makeup artists, as if wielding concealer requires government oversight. Thirteen license bartending; in nine, those who wish to pull pints must first pass an exam. Such examples are popular among critics of licensing, because the threat from unlicensed staff in low-skilled jobs seems paltry. Yet they are not representative of the broader harm done by licensing, which affects crowds of more highly educated workers like Ms Varnam. Among those with only a high-school education, 13% are licensed. The figure for those with postgraduate degrees is 45%.
[...] One way of telling that many licences are superfluous is the sheer variance in the law across states. About 1,100 occupations are regulated in at least one state, but fewer than 60 are regulated in all 50, according to a report from 2015 by Barack Obama's White House. Yet a handful of high-earning professions are regulated everywhere. In particular, licences are more common in legal and health-care occupations than in any other.
A prospective: Milton Friedman's thoughts on Licensing .
You want a capitalist free market, but only for other people.
there are multiple tiers of the license. How much you need depends on what chemicals you work with. If you're a dude (most of us /.ers are) you have no idea how crazy some of chemicals they work with are. The stuff women will do to get straight hair if they're born with curly or curly hair if they're born with straight is absurd. Come to think of it, every girl I've ever met wants the opposite type of hair they were born with...
I think the rise of licenses isn't just mean spirited folks wanting to raise wages. It's got more to do with computers making it easy to track folks and wide spread mass media leading to more people hearing stories of what happens when somebody without training does something dangerous. If it's one thing that 20 years in the workforce has taught me it's that companies do as little training as humanly possible.
Hi! I make Firefox Plug-ins. Check 'em out @ https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/youtube-mp3-podcaster/
One wields a brush. The other must navigate a complex legal framework of what is and isn't allowed to be done, who can and can't be served, and often deals with people who are dangerously addicted to the products they serve. The latter makes perfect sense to license or oversee in some way or another.
If you want to help solve this, donate to the Institute for Justice. They are the most prominent organization fighting "license to be employed" laws.
Licensing is reasonable when the risk of harm from the incompetent is unacceptable and the licensing requirements are kept to the minimum required to protect from incompetency. For example, the ABA allows damn near anyone who can pass the bar exam to practice as a lawyer, and have tacitly or deliberately allowed an oversupply of parasitic thieves, which has allowed their salary to float with demand.
On the other hand, the Realtor boards don't require competency to become a realtor, and there are several incompetent realtors. They do, however, artificially limit the number of brokers in order to keep their individual pockets well padded. This is not good for the customers. Everyone who's bought a house has had several thousands of dollars of entrance fee charged by a broker, who's only value added to the system is resetting passwords to the MLS database.
Aircraft pilots? The FAA has kept fairly reasonable standards for licensing non-commercial pilots. the level of training required has crept up about 20% to pass the test, though the paper requirements have remained the same for the last 40 years, and accident rates have gone down commersurately. However, tripling the required experience to be an airline pilot has done nothing positive for safety, but has run up salaries hugely and caused the airlines to lower hiring standards inside the pool of ATP pilots. My decade of inexperience flying airplanes that are now obsolete leaves me "qualified" to fly when younger guys who have recent experience and a checkride in the exact same airplane aren't "qualified". You're paying for that every time you fly.
The stated purpose of the license is to attest to a standard. We see that elsewhere. Any organization can publish a standard. Businesses try to meet the standard that is best for their business model, consumers look for the standard that suits their needs the best. Healthy competition in all markets would allow many different standards to coincide. Government should only get involved to set a bare minimum standard, to put a bottom to the market. It should be clear that this is a bare minimum, and their should be social stigma with a provider who tries to get away with only providing the bare minimum quality.
Maybe there should be licensing for posting on teh interwebs. The test could involve basic literacy, like knowing the difference between prospective and perspective.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
There's an excellent Planet Money episode about this:
https://www.npr.org/sections/m...
I know a family doc who is the first one to admit that he is overqualified to do most of what he does - a nurse practitioner is more than capable to do most of what he does. He does some light surgery - wart and lipoma removal in addition to his practice. He's board with most of what he does. He likes family medicine is the answer he gave when asked why he didn't become a specialist.
But the physicians in this state of Georgia have lobbied heavily to keep NPs from doing the stuff that's boring to MDs without MD supervision all because of revenue.
And I know an NP who has had a doc wrongfully give her the wrong feedback about some drug dosages - so they need to spare the nonsense about patient safety.
AND many patients prefer NPs over docs for basic care.
So, get this:
Restricting NPs does nothing for patient care or safety.
Adds costs for no reason.
And as more docs go concierge, there are less for us little people - AND they restricted our access to affordable healthcare to preserve their ultra high incomes. Spare me the "they have all these student loans!" Uh, a year out of residency my buddy calls up the loan company, "How much to pay it off?"
"$194,000"
"OK. Check is on its way."
He wasn't stupid and didn't buy a Porsche, a big McMansion in a gated community and marry some hot chick who flunked out of beauty school who wanted to marry a doctor and spend $$$$ at Bloomingdales
Our medical system in the USA is the worst in the industrialized World.
Licensing also benefits bureaucrats and enforcement agencies as well as providing fees to boost the budgets of government.
If you can't tax it, license it to death.
This should be an easy issue. Libertarian publications like Reason https://reason.com/archives/2018/01/19/barber-cops-bust-high-school-dropouts, and center-left publications like The Atlantic https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/08/trump-obama-occupational-licensing/536619/ agree that this is a problem. Heck as The Atlantic article points out, this is even an issue where Donald Trump and Obama seem to agree. Unfortunately, as long as lobbying can occur by licensing groups and professional association at state capitals, they'll do an effective job of protecting themselves from the sort of serious reform that is needed.
The rich bribe the communist governments to pass laws making it too expensive for the poor to raise capital to compete with the rich. The irony is that the poor elect the communists who claim that these laws will make it more expensive for the rich to get richer. The poor aren't poor they're stupid.
In many cases, a license is a form of certification, like CCNA or MCSE. This just makes the government responsible for setting the level of compulsory certification instead of an industry body. Some certifications, such as in child care, don't certify a base level of knowledge, only that someone hasn't been caught yet.
That engineer has to be able to prove their bridge will work over time for the use it was designed for, in the conditions it was built.
Giving away the word "engineer" to someone with no skills for "equality" reasons will not result in a bridge that works long term.
Nations need to have confidence in the bridges they use.
Need medical care? the doctor, any doctor in any hospital should have passed that nations medical exams and be under constant review and have their results look at.
A medical system needs to have confidence that any on duty doctor can do what they got a job for.
A rescue helicopter to get people to hospital that can fly day and night needs the crew to actually be able to fly in day and night conditions.
A person working on a production like and its electoral system needs to be able to show they have the skills to work on that system.
That "licence" tells the factory owner, the insurance company and all other workers the work done is to a nations standards and was correct and safe.
That any further work can build on existing quality work.
The electrical, water, gas networks have to be designed and installed to some standard so all surrounding homes are safe to some standard for many years.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
Yes, a typo. Perspective. I'm glad you managed to eek out the meaning of the comment.
What guilds you ask? Way back when, anyone could claim to be a bread maker, or tanner, or brewer. At some point, due to various reasons, those who took pride in their work and felt their standard of excellence should be met by the shyster down the stall banded together and formed guilds.
Those guilds set minimum standards for quality such as no sawdust in bread or beer which wasn't watered down or had spices thrown in to cover up bad tastes or bad alcohol.
Fast forward to today and for somewhat similar reasons, professions want people to meet minimum standards of service. For example, the person who colors your hair should have some basic knowledge of how not to burn your skin or turn your hair into straw when applying the mixed chemicals.
Now I know what many of you are going to say. "I'm a programmer and I've never been involved in a guild or union or anything like them. Employers simply hire me."
Oh really? Those employers never asked what your qualifications were? Never asked how many years experience you had in python or Rust or whatever language they're looking for? They never asked to see examples of your work? Never quizzed you on your knowledge?
What they did is no different than what people being licensed go through. You have to meet some minimum standard set by the employer in the same manner someone has to meet the minimum standard to be a cosmetologist, an attorney or doctor.
To those who say, "Free markets!", what happens when your scalp is burned getting your hair colored? What if the person, somehow, gets the wash in your eyes and causes damage? Your response is most likely to get an attorney to sue them for damages. Question: how do you know that attorney is qualified to handle your case?
The thing you didn't mention explicitly is that coming up with these things is not useless to them.
Unless a way can be found to make it so, they'll keep doing it, and their power extends strongly downward, while ours extends upwards in a very weak and diffused manner. Even that may be an illusion; the number of non-establishment legislators who are willing to reform the various agencies with regulatory power are few indeed: we can't seem to get out of the two-party imposed oligarchy at all.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
*eke
Even more than all those chemicals was the large number of dangerous sanitation situations and the education/certification in order to avoid those.
When I was considering culinary arts, there were similiar ones for food service professionals (ServSafe, plus at least two others.) They were ~100 dollars every 5 years and were required for at least one member of staff at all places that served 'fresh' food. Much like the cosmetology licenses above they were primarily spurred by spates of sickness in customers caused by either cutting corners, or insufficient sanitation education resulting in transmission of disease between either employees and customers, or in the case of cosmetology, customers and customers as the result of insufficient sanitizing of the tools between uses on different customers.
There are many other industries that have licensing for similiar reasons, like the independent automotive repair industry, various aspects of the computer industy, every major blue collar industry, etc. The reason they have these is thanks to people not being responsible and either educating their employees or themselves on the necessary industry standards for work they are doing, resulting in harm to society as a whole. If we want to get rid of all these specialty certifications then we are going to need a MUCH broader general education program and change the book learning curriculum and include more hands on curriculum *BEFORE* trade schools/college to help instill a better and broader body of knowledge and common sense in regards to sanitation, chemical interactions, safety interlocks, and maintaining equipment in a manner that ensures all fasteners and seals have been properly tightened or replaced to ensure parts aren't falling off high pressure/high speed equipment where it might kill somebody.
Since the above won't happen, we have a bunch of stupid inane certifications people need because common sense and general knowledge are not regarded as financially beneficial aspects of our society. If they were, most of these aspects WOULD be handled in on the job training by experienced professionals in that trade, and while some are, just as many seasoned professionals are incompetent in their trade and only discovered under scrutiny of their conduct or after a dangerous failure occurs, often after years of mistraining other individuals with bad habits/misinformation.
Given all the stories in the news about bad doctors and bad lawyers getting caught, with professional certification, and imagine how much worse it will be with every job unregulated and every person telling you whatever credentials, real or fictitious, will help them get your business, without any form of oversight that could publicly pull their certification. Even now you occassionally see people sneaking through in areas where professional credentials aren't scrutinized before the 'uncertified professionals' are allowed to set up shop and begin serving the public. And while some of them do operate just fine, there are plenty more stories of the opposite occurring.
How unfortunate that some think inequality is an unintended consequence and not the desired outcome.
The licensed engineer passed a test to get licensed (probably.) This does not prove anything about the bridge. Only about their ability to take tests.
The review, certainly. But again, passing a test means you can pass a test. It doesn't mean you provide good medical care. Review of your actual performance, however, could do so.
This is definitely true. But you're talking about an actual test of ability here. Not a sit-down license test as is typical for most other roles. Apples and oranges. Further, this is essentially the "review", as opposed to the test: Show us you can actually do the job's tasks, as opposed to show us you can regurgitate rote answers.
Licensing tests don't do that, though. They just show you can regurgitate canned answers. Actually doing the work is the only valid test of this. Ask someone if they can; if they say yes, have them show you. This is a far more useful and valid mechanism than "did you pass a license test." Same thing for "we require a degree." What you need is competence; a degree and/or a license is a poor and non-exclusive proxy, and simply stands in for incompetence in hiring and task-assignment capability.
No. Not at all. What it actually does is move liability around. Very convenient in a litigious society like ours, certainly, but in no way any guarantor of standards, correctness, or safety.
A relevant anecdote: When I moved in here, there was one electrical box. It had been installed by licensed electrical contractors. At considerable expense. It was a mess. For one thing, the grounding was outright wrong. For another, it was basically a bunch of tangled spaghetti. I ripped it out, and rebuilt it to a safe and sane standard. My efforts are 100% to code, and much safer; theirs were not to code and subjected some lines to far more loads than they should have. They were licensed electrical contractors. I am not.
Bottom line: competence is something you demonstrate and leverage on the job. Testing, with the exception of the performance-related testing such as a pilot must undergo, is not. Therefore, to assure competence, you either do it on the job or you pretend that a proxy - a non-operational test - will do it for you. But it won't.
There seem to be 3 kinds of licenses out there for jobs.
There are licenses that you absolutely do want to exist (for example you most definitely should need a license to be a doctor or a lawyer or a pilot or a bus driver)
Then there are licenses that definitely should exist but where the things that require such a license go far too overboard. A requirement that someone doing electrical work have a license is a good thing (since it ensures they know how to make things safe) but too many cases exist where a "licensed electrician" is required to do something when it shouldn't be required (e.g. those stories of people needing an electrical ticket just to plug something into a power point in a conference hall). Plenty of other examples out there where this "over-licensing" exists. (those in the hair and beauty profession for example is one often cited)
And then there are licenses that shouldn't exist at all. Like the ridiculous idea that you should need a license to do computer repairs (a thing in some jurisdictions I believe) or that you need a license to be a tour guide or a carpenter. (also a thing in some jurisdictions)
You're required to pass a test on how to recognize fake ids, determine if someone has had too much to drink and needs to be shut off, and what your legal responsibilities and liabilities are as a server. The permit cost is $8.99, and includes a video tutorial.
That seems pretty reasonable to me. It's not like they're testing you on whether you can mix a Martini.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
The reason doctors get paid a lot has nothing to do with the fact they are required to have a license. It has to do with supply and demand and an artificial Ricardian Rent that is imposed by the American Medical Association. If they stopped imposing limits on number of medical schools that can exist and number of medical students that can enroll every year, we would have more specialists and all doctors would get paid less - on par with their European counterparts.
Nurses try to do the same by imposing ridiculous standards to become BSN and MSN/NP certified, with individual programs having very high academic requirements and standards, with some programs approaching 50% attrition rate. The effect is the same as medical school, except when you get to med school its virtually impossible to get flunked.
When I worked as a certified EMT I can tell you there is no such union or association lobbying on my behalf, so when inter-facility transport company or a hospital wants to hire an EMT they can afford to pay as little as possible because there are plenty of people who want the job and can become certified.
So don't believe the economist article when they think that eliminating regulation or loosening requirements will lower how much you pay - an uneducated and untrained practitioner is dangerous and will drive up insurance rates which will be always be translated to consumer paying more.
The best possible outcome is that of an actuarial profession - anyone can get certified as long as you pass stringent exams which don't even cost that much, and you can study on your own time without any middleman (college) taking a cut.
And the difference between "teh" and "the"...
My question is, who does the licensing? If it is a state board ensuring that a plumber knows the difference between a PVC sewer pipe and a PEX-A water inlet, that is one thing. However, if regulatory capture happens, and the licensing becomes knowing how to use one product maker's stuff above all else, then it is worthless.
IT doesn't really have many certificates that are vendor independent, except perhaps the A+, and the CISSP. Instead, we have RedHat certs, Cisco certs, Microsoft certs, Amazon certs. What is needed is to have something that covers the basics of IT that don't really change. For example, security basics, the 3-2-1 principle of backups, RTO, RPO, differences between test, production, and development environments, types of malware, advantages and disadvantages of backup media (tape, cloud, drives), types of RAID, SSD versus HDD, and basic, universal concepts that apply regardless of what platform someone is on. A licensing body in IT that isn't locked to a specific OS or vendor would do wonders in at least ensuring someone has a certain baseline of knowledge.
Given the prevalence of autocorrect, it is no longer possible to distinguish a typo from choosing an incorrect but similar word.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
+1 irony. Or -1 whoosh. Hard to tell. Let's ask Poe?
If it weren't for deadlines, nothing would be late.
At some point you are correct. There are certain professions that should require licensing. Generally these are professions that involve some level of personal safety (medical) or fiduciary responsibility (legal.)
At some point your argument falls apart. Not exactly sure why you need to be licensed to:
Decorate a house
Braid hair (NOT cut it)
Walk dogs
Sell caskets
Be a locksmith
Run a pawn broker
Run a flower shop
Operate a food truck (ON TOP of your regular commercial drivers license AND health certificate)
Install home theater equipment
Run a travel agency
Package things for shipping
Upholster furniture
I'm sure you could come up with some corner case that would involve safety in any of these cases, but you could do the same for, pretty much, ANY profession.
So the question becomes is if the licensing scheme is doing more to protect consumers, or to protect established professionals from competition.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Plenty of obvious roles that have the possibility of harming people.
when people cannot understand why a standard or a right exists. Because they live in a world made safe by the existence of it. So they get rid of it.
I have been in two jurisdictions where there have been notable (luckily failed) attempts to regulate programmers. One attempt was that all software must be signed off by a professional engineer, and the other was just a professional "self-regulating" society of computer professionals where you couldn't deliver anything software related without being a member in good standing.
The people who were involved were all assholes. At a local conference someone jokingly suggested that they be blacklisted; which then turned into a circulated list of people who had tried to make it happen. From many of the key companies in town they and the companies they represented were not completely blacklisted so much as scorned. One of the main guys complained to me that his business lost the ability to be profitable for about 3 years after that. I laughed.
The gist of the article is that professional guilds exist to keep people out, but I see it as their also wanting control as well. The point of some of these societies is to even prevent competition among the "professionals" I suspect that if you are a dentist and you started inoculating people against cavities for free, (assuming there was such an inoculation) that you would be standing in front of a standards committee in a heartbeat. Or if you were a orthodontist who just went completely cut rate and offered services for cost plus a small living expense for yourself. Even overpaying your staff might find you up for a dental investigation.
Of course licensing is unequal: only those who can pass the tests can be licensed. Some can do it while others can't. Welcome to life, we are NOT equal. We are diverse. As a result, I do not have a problem with testing for ability. However, I do have one with the many licensing schemes that fail to do this while producing armies of half useless paper-mill drones. It's turned into a system wide scam.
I'm dealing with a "psychotherapist" who specializes in "neuroatypical disorders", with no license, no degree, and absolutely no training. They've finally taken *one* course after years of professional practice, with the "Center for Self Leadership", for training, which is a psychotherapy organization which gives no grades, no certification, and whose members claim "training does not matter, it's the quality of the therapist". It's amazing how they can charge $1300 for a weekend seminar while constantly proclaiming "training doesn't matter". Imagine my joy to discover a family member is going there for therapy that turned from ADD coaching to diagnosing other family members, diagnosing them and explaining to my beloved family member how everything is the fault of the obviously deluded other family members without even meeting them.
It's very affirming and empowering, and it's a violation of so many profesisonal standards I can't even *begin* to count. But see, "psychoterapist" is not a licensed profession. Psyciatrist and psychologist are. So yes, actually getting training, and a license, can help prevent seriously destructive behavios.
Gary Chartier
"Tempers are wearing thin. Let's just hope some robot doesn't kill everybody." --Bender
Eek!
For hire.
You couldn't work in that industry without documented skill, knowlege and experience in the speciality for which you were employed.
Then how does one gain experience in the first place? It's like no one wanting to hire junior programmers anymore.
*eak
Especially when autocorrect decides you mean a word that you have never heard of, and won't allow your correction.
John Stossel likes to go after the whole overly "licensing" thing. Here are some good videos of him that are very relevant to the topic:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
Of course, few people think that all licensing should go away, Stossel doesn't either. But it is getting a bit ridiculous.
As someone who has been involved in fashion, art, and glamour photography for some time, I find the article's dismissal of cosmetology licensing to be careless and poorly researched.
Applying makeup is a licensed activity because of significant health and safety issues related to hygiene and proper use of certain products (such as latex, for example, as used in the movie and theater industries). You could very literally lose an eye, go into anaphylactic shock, or get a nasty rash because some village idiot decided to play makeup artist and didn't know what they were doing. People doing this really DO need to know what they are doing.
Likewise, bartender licenses are less about memorizing obscure drink recipes and more about properly working within the law around alcoholic drinks and potentially inebriated customers. These licenses are not a burden to obtain (working with a non-profit art gallery, we obtained them for some of our board members so we could legally serve wine at our shows), and they are a serious intervention to help cut down on drunk driving, alcohol poisoning, and underage drinking.
Here in Texas, the licensing agency recently got rid of mandatory licensing of interior designers (my wife is one) and talent/modeling agencies (which, again, I'm familiar with through photography). The result is a total disaster in both fields. To do an effective job, interior designers need to understand building codes, proper construction techniques, when to call in a structural engineer, permitting, blueprints and drawings, special laws around commercial furniture, etc. But without a license, anyone who watches a bunch of HGTV and thinks they are the next Joanna Gaines can go represent themselves as a designer, and homeowners and businesses *don't know what they don't know*. And in the talent agency world, particularly in modeling, there is a HUGE problem of outright scams, not to mention sketchy guys claiming to "manage" models or singers, who act more like wannabe pimps.
So yeah, maybe licensing can be a bit of a protection racket in some industries, but it's way too easy to deride someone else's education from a place of ignorance about the service they are performing and the risks involved in the decisions they make.
(Also, make no mistake, this article isn't about makeup or pints of lager, it's about an ongoing, long-term, well-funded dispute about what the differences should be between a doctor and a nurse practitioner. The arguments about other industries are merely window-dressing.)
You're missing the point: the article is basically the standard neo-Liberal (for US readers: Libertarian) propaganda piece you'd expect from The Economist.
While not as bad as Koch-funded think tanks, on economy their stance is virtually the same: take away all worker protections and let the owner class run Gilded Age style rampant.
"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
Many of those "licenses" are trivial to acquire and contain relevant legal or otherwise need-to-know information. Even if much of that knowledge is trivial, you want to be sure that your (insert-profession-here) in fact does have it.
In particular, licences are more common in legal and health-care occupations than in any other.
And those are exactly the kind of professions where a) a laymen has no chance to spot any even halfway good con-man and b) you really, really want to be in the hands of someone who actually has the skills they claim.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Is there a difference between a license and certification? I was a state certified water plant operator. That ensured that I had the knowledge, skills and abilities to produce water that was safe to drink. I worked with liquid chlorine, potassium permanganate and anhydrous ammonia. Sometimes I worked sixteen hour shifts.
1) And yet you missed interwebs?
2) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Hand it on on teh way out.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
That's why I use an older device based on carbon and powered by glucose.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
You don't want to get some of that stuff in your eyes. It stings worse than Lennart Poettering's jizz.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If you can't figure out how to fix autocorrect, you need to turn in your geek card, and get off of /. You don't belong here, now GET OFF MY LAWN!
Just another day in Paradise
While a desire to blunt competition is definitely a part of this I would submit that the massive growth in the number of lawyers and litigation is also a big piece. Since 1950 the population of the US has roughly doubled while the number of lawyers has gone up by 500% (https://associatesmind.com/2013/08/19/historical-growth-rate-of-lawyers-in-usa-chart/ ) Itâ(TM)s a lot easier to file a lawsuit if you can point at rules not being followed. At the same time, if youâ(TM)re trying to prevent lawsuits you try and make sure that people know the rules... of course, knowing the rules and being able to do a good job is not the same thing so in the long run, this mainly helps the legal profession.
Suppose you were an idiot. And suppose you were a member of congress. But then I repeat myself. -- Mark Twain
The real problem is that there are no commit log messages. I mean, when someone decides that we should require license for bartenders, they don't explain the reasons why such requirement was needed. If the license would have reasoning like:
"In year 1980, 20% of bars that were investigated, bartenders did not wash their hands and this caused 15% of the customers to get sick. To minimize the risk of the customers, we should require all bartenders to pass basic hygiene education so they understand why they need to wash their hands, as a proof of passing this exam, they will get bartender license that should be required for one to do this work. "
Now, when you want to get rid of bartender licenses, you can consider is this still needed. You can run experiments by allowing anyone to bartender and measure how many customers get sick and make decisions based on science.
I recently got curious about the concept of "Professional Engineer". Generally, it's aimed at civil engineers but it's being expanded to cover software. There are no sample tests and the list of topics covered is so vague that you couldn't practically study for it. But the concept also runs counter to an old engineering joke. The trustees of a university want to find out if the professors know their stuff so they come up with a question: what's 2+2? So they go to the math department and ask that question. The professors say "Oh, that's easy. It's 4." Then they go to the physics department and they respond, "Oh, it's 4.0000000 with an uncertainty of another decimal place." Then they go to the engineering department and they respond, "Just a minute. Let me get my handbook." Lastly, they go to the accounting department and they look around to see if anyone can hear them and whisper, "What do you want it to be?"
Whether or not licensing helps or injures some sort of Greater Good[TM] — and how to calculate it — is irrelevant.
What matters is that the licensing requirements deprive us all — the would be buyers and sellers of services — of freedom.
What used to be a right, free to exercise, became a privilege available only with government's permission. And that's wrong and outrageous on its own.
In Soviet Washington the swamp drains you.
"In particular, licences are more common in legal and health-care occupations than in any other."
I dont know, maybe because the consumer wants to know that they are going to get a minimum standardized quality of service for something that is considered a major spending event. You know like any time you may need a lawyer... or health care if you are in the US.
FFS, Yes licensing puts up a barrier to entry but that is also because one is usually needed. I want bartenders to understand the consequences of over serving someone, just like i want cosmetologists to understand what the consequences of the chemicals they are using are. On top of that its not as if all of this licensing is really that much of a barrier to entry. To serve alcohol in Ontario (Canada) its a small fee and an on-line test, that really doesn't do shit to boost inequality. The licensing problems brought up are over blown and are really only a problem if the total cost of the licensing outweighs the actual risk involved in the profession.
There is and there is not. Per se, there is nothing wrong with certification — whereby someone else attests, that you know and/or are skilled at some field.
Licensing is the government turning a right, which only the Judicial branch can revoke upon successful prosecution by the Executive for violating Legislature-issued laws, into a mere privilege, which the Executive can deny or withdraw on a whim.
The concepts often work together and so are easily confused:
Such requirements deprive us of rights. According to TFA, they also make us less efficient, but I don't think that ought to matter — because the rights are more important, even if the efficiency actually improved.
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Given the prevalence of autocorrect, it is no longer possible to distinguish a typo from choosing an incorrect but similar word.
That's prepositus! ;)
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
Blunting competition and boosting inequality is their entire function.
The work I do does involve licensing, but as long as somebody in the company has a license on record with the state the rest of us can work under that license. So, the barrier to entry is at the company level: Other companies who don't have licensed personnel on staff can't compete in the same way that we do.
From the "right" side of the barrier, I have no problem with it. If you're on the "wrong" side of the barrier, cross it. Qualify tor the test, study, and pass it. The barrier is NOT that high.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
in just about every jurisdiction I'm aware of. Of course, your work needs to be inspected to the same standards as that of licensed contractors.
Licensing comes into play when you want to work on OTHER PEOPLE's houses, or perform such work in exchange for money.
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This is one of the big reasons I say fuck this country
Most studies find that licensing requirements raise wages in a profession by around 10%, probably by making it harder for competitors to set up shop.
How about because the people with the actual education, training, and experience required to do the work properly are the ones who can get licensed ... and they cost more than the clowns?
I am a licensed bartender, in a state that doesn't require licenses. Still, having the license makes it much more likely that I will be hired. Why? Insurance.
About half of the bartender license training isn't about mixing drinks, or "pulling pints"; it's about serving alcohol responsibly: How strong is the drink you are making. How many drinks should a customer have per hour. What to do if a customer comes to the bar already drunk. What to do if a drunk customer wants to drive home. What IDs are acceptable. How to clean the bar, glasses, beer tap lines, etc.
Similarly, I used to be a licensed painter. Why would a painter need a license to be a painter, all you need is to put paint on a wall, right? Well, almost all of the training was about ladders, how to move them, how to set them up, how to not fall off of them, and most importantly how to work with them around power lines.
Sure, some licenses seem silly. But, most usually have at least some good reason why they exist.
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I guess the US is heading into a new guilded age?
'Stupidity is an often fatal disease' - R. A. Heinlein
... there are still no licensing requirements for slashdot editors.
That's a shame.
So, our friendly lobbyists for CompTIA and other training companies got together and convinced the DoD to implement regulation 8570, which basically required anyone touching a keyboard to obtain certification...typically Security+ or something similar. This has brought millions and millions of welfare dollars in for these companies, and provided virtually no improved security for the DoD.
But don't worry, government is here to help you...spend more tax dollars for useless shit.
Just another day in Paradise
Licensing protects citizens in the eyes of politicians; so we should license politicians. They should pass a test rigourously examining their knowledge of the pertaining fields they will control, as well as general civics and the legal structure of laws, checks and balances and the constitution. Then swear under penalty of perjury to abide by those laws and uphold the constitution. Else have their license revoked.
There's absolutely something wrong with gun culture in the US.
It isn't about laws, it's about attitudes.
My country doesn't have much gun violence compared to the US, but we've got all kinds of guns. Why? Because those guns are not meant to hurt people, they're meant for hunting, or for target shooting, or the like.
By contrast, you can't make it past one discussion in the US without someone going "You can't take our guns! I might have to kill someone with my gun!"
You can say "The vast majority are suicides", but you know what? The US has an astronomical murder rate, and most of that is with guns. My city is considered the murder capital in my country, with a rate of about 10 murders per 100k people. Compare to St. Louis or Detroit, that's nothing. There's dozens of US cities with at least twice that.
I don't disagree; it's good to have some verification of the expected qualifications. But it needs to be applied sanely. Last time this subject came up, I looked up my state's list of licensed professions (outside of engineering and medicine), and requirements thereto. Most were sane enough -- some 50-60 hours of training for the more-basic jobs, a bit more for the more-complex.
And then there was the weird outlier -- a requirement of 1100 hours of training for (IIRC) physical trainer. And I was like, WTF? Did someone take such a dislike to the profession as to effectively prohibit it??
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
Why - because you want to herniate a disk or tear a tendon in your leg because the trainer doesn't know what he's doing?
even the human grade stuff is a problem if it's used wrong. Like I said, you'd be amazed at the kinds of chemicals girls'll use in the pursuit of nice hair.
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Would I want unlicensed people putting stuff on my body near my eyes?
Licensing usually contains training to recognize medical conditions. For example barbers and beauticians see your scalp closer than anyone and they receive training in recognizing various illnesses.
Licensed people also must take CEU's in many cases.
Licensing frequently includes a criminal background check as well as ongoing annual checks for criminal activity.
Can licensing be abused and become a taxi-medallion like program? Sure.
But reasonable licensing requirements have value.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That's what this sounds like. Make the licenses too expensive so people can't ever get ahead by improving their income with a better job.
Come on. No matter what side you're on, that's a pretty weaksauce argument. Examples: Texas, Arkansas.
That wasn't the absurdity; it was that physical trainer (or whatever it was, but something on that order) licensing required ~20 times more hours than anything else. Your cited injuries are certainly no worse than, frex, hair bleach in the eyes, and there's just not that much skill differential between PT and *everything else*.
My guess is someone with an existing monopoly observed the state's lack of new PT clients (confined to snowbird trust-funders; not something locals would pay for), thus lobbied to protect their monopoly, and the state legiscritters didn't see why not.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
So, the poster and author think that we should stop licensing. No license needed to claim to be a doctor, or a dentist, or a lawyer, or a surgeon, or a mechanic, or an engineer, or....
On the other hand, what would help "competition" is for companies and governments to *prove* that a certain certificate or degree is necessary.
Y'know, like in the mid-nineties, when my late wife, the lab tech with 15 years experience was let go on a Friday, and that Sunday, they were looking for B.Sc. chemist... to be underpaid, and do lab tech work (which would have lowered costs to the clients). Or the idiots in HR, who want certs for languages that don't have certs, or.....
Because a PT can actually damage or kill you and what other training do they get? It's not like they're an MD with 4-8 years of post-graduate schooling and a 1-2 year internship or anything.
The cesspool just got a check and balance.
And a bartender could poison you.
One of the sane-requirements licenses was for construction blasting -- ie. person who handles and sets high explosives. I dunno, maybe PT isn't quite as demanding...
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
I think PT is still quite a bit more broad than that. Aside form not herniating disks and ripping tendons, PT's rehab people that do have those injuries. And as 80% of any weight loss plan is dieting, you'd want something healthy, not crazy like the grapefruit diet, and watching out for eating disorders. And that fifty year old diabetic who's suddenly huffing and puffing - is he winded and just needs a break, a packet of sugar, or should you be getting the gym's defibrillator just in case? Hair stylists don't have to worry about any of that.