I run into too many parents who say they want their kids to get a good career, so I tell them they have to push at home and at school for the basics of English and math. Not just as they were taught, but as those subjects are now applied in the information age. I then hear about how they weren't any good in those subjects, but they got a job anyway. The economic connection between the foundational skills in school and the 21st century workplace is often lost at the time when it is most needed.
I think this is the key part; it was easier to get a good job in the past without any special skills. The golden age of manufacturing jobs have come and gone and people today need a variety of hard and soft skills to get ahead. I agree that school is an important means by which to teach these skills, and this goes well beyond memorizing dates and earning A's. Being good at school is not sufficient to reap this benefit.
We tend to talk about how good students don't always become well-compensated employees - and around here I am sure that is what both most of us and most people we know are most threatened by - but wage stagnation and decline has more to do with people who were never good students at all because they were never able to apply the patience, interest, self-discipline, or obedience that is usually involved in being a good student. The filter of higher education still works, in other words.
I know people in both sets: The ones who "did everything right" yet have minimal career prospects, and those who were never able to thrive in school and who never managed to acquire the credentials that are all but necessary for admittance to the salaries class. Necessary, but (of course) not sufficient.
Anyway, as someone with some familiarity with both performance measurement and the workings of white collar workplaces in 2016, I find the Cowen/Tabarrok "end of information asymmetry" thesis pretty laughable. We have never had more ways of measuring and monitoring performance, it is true, but we have also never had more ways of manipulating those measures. In short, the ratio of meaning:measurement has never been more skewed. Some people are able to reap disproportionate rewards because they understand this, but this should not be taken as a sign that those people are actually supereffucient high performers.
(The "Ezra Klein Voxes himself" example is telling in ways that are, at a minimum, extremely tangential to the point that the authors mean to illustrate.)
There is some truth here: we hear about people like Einstein who did not get the best grades in school and went on to do brilliant things. Those people are a tiny minority, though. There is still a correlation between success in school and finding remunerative work after school.
My major concern is that many young people have been told that doing well in your classes is an optimal strategy for schooling. We're gradually getting around to the point where we realize that that is not exactly the case. There is much more to get out of schooling than good grades.
Something it took me time to realize is that just working to get the best grades in classes is in fact a suboptimal strategy. That route tends to lead you into grad school, and academia is a well that has largely dried up. If you work to do well enough in your classes, but also network and develop connections then it is much easier to move forward. Looking back in my own past, me moving forward had nothing to do with acing exams and everything to do with a student position I obtained in the university that exposed me to what would become my future career path.
