Comedian Groucho Marx had a pretty good bit called “The Five Minute University ”—essentially cutting higher education down to the bare bones: what people will typically remember years later. Economics? Supply and demand. Philosophy? “To be or not to be, that is the question.” This revolutionary technique would cut costs, save time, and spare us the pain of forgetting what we’ve learned.
I always considered this idea as “just for laughs”, but my own college experience (and those of many others) offer fresh perspectives. You borrow money, usually tens (or hundreds) of thousands of dollars, sit in classrooms, dutifully read, study, research, and memorize, all for—what, exactly? Turning irresponsible youth into marginally less irresponsible adults? Getting a credential that some employer is willing to pay for? Past generations took it for granted that education was the primary key to upward mobility and opportunities. This remains true. But past generations also equated education to a college degree—with the advent of the Internet, proliferation of both reliable and unreliable information, and the general bureaucratic entrenchment of the higher education system, we can no longer take this for granted.
For now, we will stop well short of claiming that university education fails a simple cost/benefit test; this is a complicated question that warrants more in-depth addressing. But we can do some good without debating this issue further, and that’s where the Ten-Minute Major comes in.
What Is A Ten-Minute Major?
The basic idea is this: an easily-digested, high-level summary of concepts and phenomena from finance and business to politics and the humanities. This will include monetary economic theory vs. practice, what makes a “good” business, which U.S. presidents are over- or underrated, why American exceptionalism comprises strengths and weaknesses, why social critics create such polarized reactions in the societies they criticize, whether a “jack-of-all-trades, master of none” really is “better by far, than a master of one”, and plenty more. As the name suggests, each piece should take roughly ten minutes to read—that is, between 2,000 and 3,000 words. Our goal isn’t to replicate or replace a college degree, but to offer a starting point to anyone—whether prospective students searching for a field that inspires them, professionals who want to broaden their horizons, or lifelong learners with burning questions—who are just looking for somewhere to start.
The human brain is fundamentally lazy: the heuristics that we’ve developed over millennia are designed to help us understand the world around us quickly and imprecisely. In The Most Important Thing, Howard Marks, founder of Oaktree Capital Management, talks about second-level thinking being key to succeeding in finance—but second-level thinking did our ancestors little good at fending off mastodons; speed was the chief cognitive concern. Since then, our society appears to have changed at a faster rate than our brains, requiring often unpleasant cognitive “work”—System 2, in psychologist Daniel Kahneman’s phrasing —to make true sense of the world around us.
This is an important caveat. We want brevity to be our friend, but oversimplification is not invited to this party. We will strive to ask tough questions, explain what we can, and leave the reader with a sense for where to take it from there.
A Few Guiding Principles
We’ll need some framework to apply to the topics we want to cover, so let’s take a minute to get philosophical. Here are seven fundamental principles that will guide our explorations.
- In aggregate, human nature is unchanging. In individuals, human potential is great. All that human nature comprises—love, self-interest, envy, inventiveness, etc.—is immutable over millennia. It is the great constant of the human experience, even as technologies, social trends, languages, and nations come and go. Inversely, human potential at the individual level is extraordinary. Even a cursory glance at history shows remarkable men and women who accomplished amazing things, despite being saddled with the same inherent humanity that is both our burden and blessing to bear. These are individuals who shape history for good and evil—and the potential to do likewise lies in each of us.
- History often rhymes. Consistent with the immutability of human nature, history lends itself to patterns and cycles that bear more than passing resemblances to each other. Financial panics, great power struggles, political rhetoric, and the rise and fall of great civilizations—nearly everything rhymes with something, even in this ever-changing world.
- It’s not a guarantee that we’ll eventually get everything right, at least not for a long time. This essentially comes down to time horizons. Take the early days of the Christian church. From Christ’s ascension to Heaven in 33 CE, Christians were ostracized and persecuted by the Romans for nearly three centuries—meaning that for nine or ten generations, Christians who may have had ultimate confidence that their faith would gain acceptance during their lifetimes were left to die disappointed. In the very long run, of course, the new faith did appeal to a Roman Emperor who executed a bold about-face on imperial policy toward believers—but vindication on Earth came too late for many. A similar question hangs in the balance as we debate the appropriate response to perceived climate change dangers and scramble head-over-heels toward the decarbonization of everything. I think it’s certainly possible that whatever our ultimate response, it could be the exact wrong one that makes the next 100 years very miserable indeed. Even if our society somehow rights the ship in 2100, it won’t make a difference to me—I hope I’m dead by then. We must take the potential risks of poor decision-making very seriously.
- It’s astonishing that things have gone as well as they have. Given how prone we are to make mistakes (and how full of them the historical records are), it’s not to be taken for granted the amazing things we enjoy today, especially in the industrialized, developed world. Modern conveniences make leisure, comfort and healthcare opportunities available to average Americans that even the richest people in history before 1900 could never imagine, let alone enjoy. As proposed above, our achievement of all this was never a foregone conclusion, so we should likewise be bold in taking steps to leave the human condition better than we find it, and be grateful to our forefathers for guiding it—imperfectly, perhaps, but still very, very well.
- True expertise is coeval with intellectual humility. I recall reading about a study in which grade-school children were asked to discern among two people, one of which was an expert in a given field. After seeing each person answer a few questions, the children overwhelmingly got it wrong, and deemed the “non-expert” as the expert. Why? Because the poser spoke with a sense of certainty and confidence about a subject that the expert knew too well to treat lightly. (As an aside, I would contend that adults would be—and frequently are—just as easily deceived.) The end of all understanding is simply the awareness of how little we understand. In order to know more, we must be content with the feeling of knowing less.
- The world is inherently full of trade-offs, probabilities, and second-order effects. Uncomfortable as it is, and hard as most of us try to ignore it, the world is painfully complex. We like to find solace in black-and-white answers, but they often miss something in a world of grey. Life is more a series of probabilities than a set of axioms. Decisions meant to have A effect upon B sometimes end up with X effect upon Y—this is because the world is dynamic, not static: we cannot effectively control for all variables we wish to hold constant.
- Our reasoning is usually worse than we think. Our brains excel at creating ex post explanations for things we observe, but often struggle to create general theories to apply in anticipation of things we may observe in the future. Compounding this challenge, we are all subject to the demons of our own self-interests and biases—all the more crippling if we remain blind to them.
If you’re a new reader looking for a place to start, here are a few of my favorites:
- A series on U.S. history told through two wildly different historical perspectives.
- A chart-filled analysis of value stocks and growth stocks.
- A series on the building blocks of a good business, from an accounting/finance standpoint.
Without further ado: welcome to the Ten-Minute Major.