Professionalisation

The pressure for economic growth is bloating the economic sphere as other arenas diminish in importance. Increasingly many activities such as looking after the eldery or bringing up children, previously motivated largely by social factors, are now being done on a professional basis.

By replacing personal relationships with financially regulated ones, professionalisation weakens friendship, crowds out altruistic transactions and minimises individuals' room to exercise personal considerations, eroding the give and take that make up a healthy community. It is also part of the vicious social cycle underway in many societies, in which productive activity is threatened by a spiralling of competitive claims over resources.

Professionalisation is often accompanied by stricter certification of competence. Apprenticeships and other relationship-based methods of skill sharing are replaced by formal, automated methods of instruction. Rent-seeking centralised bodies are established that monopolise assessment of competence. Laws are passed, often citing grounds such as public safety, that make more and more activities the exclusive remit of certified 'professionals' - that is, individuals who have bought in to a particular power structure.

Professionalisation is often justified on grounds that it raises standards, but in fact this is just one of many possible effects. The clearest effect it has on professionals is probably a homogenisation of the range of services provided. The effect it has on non-professionals is clearer. Erecting such barriers of entry to 'professionalised' activites increases their potential for revenue by discouraging individuals from doing (or even understanding) such activity themselves. Feelings of powerlessness are promoted as a disempowered base of individual consumers is encouaged to trust neither in their own, nor in one anothers' capabilities, but only in accredited 'professionals', whose main motivation is money.

Although damaging to both the individual and to the social interplay that characterises healthy community, professionalisation continues apace because it is associated with economic growth. We are privileged to be able to work as amateurs, who aim to ignore money and work for love instead. Our work on an altruistic theory of economics is an effort to extend this freedom to others.

FURTHER READING » Jeff Schmidt: Disciplined Minds,