No Econ Degree, No Problem

I have a few thoughts about this post.

One is that the world’s use of academic credentials to gauge someone’s competence is an anachronism.  It was mostly true in the past purely as a function of limited access to knowledge with academic institutions acting as gatekeepers. Even with the existence of textbooks, in fast moving fields textbooks are often outdated and cannot bring a random person up to speed to current state of art. To do that you have to access the people in the field. 

Turns out that the Internet has opened up that access considerably, in part because almost everyone is now directly accessible and in part because those people can easily put their latest thoughts out at one to many scale. 

But another thing is evident to me from knowing lots of really smart but also really wealthy people. When they are interested in something they can just hire the smartest people in the world and they can get up to speed quickly, to the point where they can then start contributing too.

Anyone who asks what academic credentials someone has as a final determinant of credibility, in this day and age, you should write that person off immediately. Great academic credentials can be a good sign but it is not necessarily a requisite signal for someone to be smart and credible. Smart people today know this.