Always Be Closing

Most sensible people recognize this scene as an indictment of the winner takes it all economics of Neoliberalism:




However is a recent post, Matthew Yglesias assured his young readers that if they want to become writers they needed to write and engage in endless self-promotion while at university rather than learn. Indeed, he suggested that doing well among professional writers, who don't necessarily know what they are writing about, was more important than understanding the issues, events, and facts of the matter:

If you want to be a writer, then writing stuff that’s interesting and getting professional writers to read it is important. I got the worst grade of my whole college career in Theda Skocpol’s class on American social policy, and that’s never stopped me from writing about American social policy—nobody’s ever asked or cared whether professors liked my essays. 

It is a modified Baldwin in which creating a name for being "interesting" takes the place of selling old people time shares they can neither afford nor use. He was taken mildly to task for under emphasizing the importance of grades for future professional or academic success. Yglesias responded that while practicing writing was more important than practicing writing or, as he put it,

My point, however, is that people make decisions about how to use their time at the margin and if what you’re interested in doing is becoming a writer then you’re better off spending your time on writing and publicizing things than on giving your term paper another round of edits.

Writing is more important than writing, he seems to say, if the writing is relentlessly self-promotional. What does he mean by at the margin?[1] He does, however, sort of defend learning

None of that, however, is to denigrates Jonathan Bernstein’s point that actually learning things is extremely valuable. Knowing more is good, but (again, at the margin) it has a somewhat attenuated relationship to grades.

My question, at this point, is how does he know if what he has learned has any validity if he doesn't think that grades reflect mastery of a body of knowledge, the ability to analysis that body of knowledge and the skill to write a compelling text based on the body of knowledge that proves the analysis's persuasiveness? He got a link from Andrew Sullivan?

Why not just turn all of our educational systems into boiler rooms and have done with it. 


[1] It's an economic term design to simplify the analysis of complex decision making processes and, much like efficient markets, self-regulation, and related etc, it's nonsense designed to simplify the analysis of complex decisions by creating a fictional "reality" in which people act the way you want them to rather than the way the do.