How Much Money To Give For 21st Birthday

Art Carden is an Assistant Professor of Economics and Business at Rhodes College in Memphis, Tennessee. Read full profile

21st Century Opportunities

Productiveness expert Jason Womack is working on a project aimed at teenagers on the careers of tomorrow. He asked me to contribute a hardly a ideas, and he graciously agreed to let ME reverse it into an article for Lifehack.org. From where I sit out, on that point are a couple of very broad categories in which citizenry can expect to excel in the future:

1. Data Analysis

Data and figuring have ne'er been cheaper than they are this morning. They are cheaper than when I first wrote this in October, they will be cheaper this afternoon, and they testament be straight cheaper this time tomorrow.

What is not falling in terms, however, is analytical ability. The power to find intelligible information in a very noisy world will be of great value in the future. If I were sixteen and knew what I do it now, I would nidus my time and DOE happening mastering the theory of probability and along erudition an analytical social skill like economic science.

This comes with an main caveat: the power to perform statistical computations away pressing a few buttons on a computer is rattling different from knowing what the output means and how to apply it. Applied mathematics computations will be almost costless in the future: there are a number of excellent, free statistical software program packages uncommitted round, and I wouldn't be surprised if "Google Stats" is in the offing somewhere.

The real prize added, though, comes from knowing what the computations mean. A displeasing fact about the way skill is done today is that while a lot of it is very reckoning-heavy, the results are a great deal interpreted incorrectly not just by the media outlets who describe on them, but past the scientists doing the investigating.

For more on this, I encourage people with advanced training in statistics to read Ziliak and McCloskey's The Cult of Statistical Significance, which I reviewed for Economic Affairs recently (a draft of my review is available on the Social Science Research Network at www.SSRN.com).

2. Ware Design

The cost of manufacturing goods continues to plummet, and as it gets cheaper and cheaper the evaluate will be added non by the physical output unconscious process but past the design process. Understanding people's goals and what they will actually use products for will be a way to add value going nervy. (To this end, I highly recommend Donald Norman's The Design of Future Things, which I expect to review in this space quondam soon).

3. "Technology Ecology"

This is kind of like tech support, but different. As production costs continue to fall, break of economic value added in design will be in work design, Beaver State what might be called "Technology Ecology." Integrating the worldly of the senior millennium (paper) with the material of the new millennium (silicon) is of overriding grandness, and there are many margins on which to add apprais by designing workspaces. The calculator has been inserted into a exercise environment designed for people pushy pieces of paper across a desk, and umteen workspaces are in essence mid-twentieth century workspaces specked with a variety of early twenty dollar bill-beginning 100 tumors. Adapting the workspace to new technology will be an important way to help people add up value in the future.

4. Financial management

System and financial illiteracy is rampant in the U.S. government and in the world-wide, and on that point is elbow room to sum up value by portion populate healthier grapple their money. My wife is a CPA and I have a PhD in economics, and one of the almost valuable lessons we've both learned is that "active management" or difficult to "play the market" is a not-freshman. We enjoy a great deal of pacification of mind by socking our money gone in passively-managed index funds. A great deal of poeple don't know what "index finances" are, which way that they are departure a lot of money on the table.

5. Personal nutrition and training

As life anticipation increases, we bequeath want to do all we can to increase the quality of our later years. It has been said that "sixty is the new forty," and as society gets wealthier there will be a lot of room to add value by serving people stay "fit and effective," to steal a phrase from Jason. Information filtering volition get in importance as the amount of information increases, and as we get richer more of us will find it to our reward to outsource nutriment- and use-related information processing.

A rapidly ever-changing world creates big challenges, but these enormous challenges are also enormous opportunities. The early 21st century presents us with incalculable opportunities to engage our creative faculties, and the fields I mention here are only few of the areas in which those opportunities will emerge.