The screenshot says “No criminal record prohibition” which I assume someone with a criminal record can apply for a magician license? Otherwise I agree with you.
Great post. Another example: I discovered last year that in NYS it is illegal to "furnish information about the character of a person" for money, without a private investigator license.
I think teachers should have to get licenses, personally. I think the tests should be free and universal throughout the US, but I do think that teachers should have to demonstrate a minimum amount of competence in their subject matter before teaching.
As someone in education, I would care much more about teacher certification it teachers were anywhere near the top 25 problems with modern American education. It is unbelievable how little you need to know to be an effective primary education teacher. Controlling for classroom discipline(obviously this is a huge part of teaching but it's one of the least significant parts of certification), I am 90% sure anyone in this comment section could be an effective teacher in a real world environment with scarce months of mediocre training. No, these are not superstar teachers, but that's because those barely exist anyway. I've met almost none and I've met hundreds of teachers. Superstars don't really go into teaching.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing in theory, but in practice our existing teacher certification requirements have very little correlation with actual teacher quality.
One reason I would like to have some kind of quality control, is because there is information asymmetry and I have no expertise or ability to judge quality myself. In low-stakes professions (e.g. hair) that's fine, and quality doesn't really correlate with training. (Also, even if the woman whose haircut was awful spreads it 10 miles, I - as an infrequent consumer of hair cuts, and without a large social circle of such women - will never know it. I have online reviews of course, but those are gameable. Again for HAIR it's not that big a deal, but for medicine or law.... It's daunting to give that up.
Depends if the potential costs are fixable with money. If an accountant royally fucks up it might be life ruining, but it's also going to be purely monetary damages that can in theory be made whole by an insurance payout. When doctors fuck up, even a successful malpractice suit doesn't actually fix the harms
Another comment: wouldn't, in the case of law, doing away with the education requirement and keeping the exam be the fairer and less distortionary policy? The DEI nonsense aspect of it is that law school might still be required (i.e. someone sitting through 3 years of classes, which are not quality-controlled) and no independent, objective measure is not required - meaning that people who can't hack it on the test get a workaround. Tests or apprenticeships for skilled professions seem like reasonable compromises.
I agree with this (see my comment below) and I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Zvispace is where you find all-exam entry supporters, but this proposal is basically never raised and I don't think there's any organized support for it. But there should be!
There's another problem to no-bar rules.
I attended a non-ABA accredited night law school in Bakersfield. Of the eight of us who took the bar that year, all eight passed and two are judges. If you go with diploma privilege, you have to tightly accredit law schools and California's dodgier law schools will expire. Some of them, of course, should! But on the whole, California gains on this system.
I'd note that to be a trader, I had to pass a test called the Series 7 that I had to burn a week studying for to ensure I would pass it, and that seemed like a highly acceptable compromise, even though a bunch of the material on the test was pretty stupid/crazy/wrong.
I got a Series 7 license in 1990 so what I know might be dated, but I think that the law license should require more than a Series 7. When I took it, the questions were not all germane to what I needed to know but they had the results on a basically immediate turnaround, which is very different (probably necessarily) from the bar.
Traders who can't do basic things do much less societal harm than lawyers who can't lawyer.
The model you describe also applies for a CFA. Law does require more knowledge so doing the exam purely on self study would be very difficult but if you dropped the formal training requirement you could develop much shorter and more innovative training or people would do what some do in the UK and not study law at all but do what is essentially an apprenticeship, which is arguably even better.
Agreed that occupational licensing primarily works like a guild or a labor union, where any increased wages come along with deadweight loss due to lower output.
But I think the next step would be to think more about which are actually the sectors where lower output is bad.
Maybe you'd agree that a hypothetical restrictive occupational licensing regime for fortune tellers would be a good thing on net, since we’d ideally prefer to reduce the fraction of our population employed in fortune telling.
The question is, how much does our society benefit from having more people employed as lawyers? Is the marginal lawyer mostly getting paid to engage in mostly zero-sum work? (I’d also note that other developed economies manage to get by with many fewer lawyers per capita.)
(And very speculatively, how much of the work product of cosmetologists is fundamentally zero-sum?)
EDIT: More speculation, a highly restrictive occupational licensing regime for AI researchers would be bullish for the future of humanity I think?
We don’t lack lawyers but they’re too damn expensive. Whatever the optimal output is, let competition determine who gets to stay in the business. Licensing doesn’t so much control output as it prevents foreign lawyers from establishing office or taking in-house jobs at lower compensation than their rentseeking US counterparts are willing to. The licensing hoops don’t actually limit output—there are already too many lawyers who can jump through them. They keep the prices up for the benefit of a domestic guild.
See Dean Baker’s Rigged (free book) where he argues other common law countries’ lawyers should be abe to practice in the US due to similarities between legal systems.
If you do occupational licensing reform that successfully reduces lawyer wages, I don’t see how that’s separable from increasing lawyer employment. I think you can only reduce wages this way if you’re also increasing the supply of lawyers.
Or, thinking about it backwards, when I go to an attorney and ask him to take my case as plaintiff, he assesses whether his 33% contingency fee will be worth it, as (chance of success x how much he’ll earn on success) vs. (the time he’ll be required to spend x the dollar value of his time). As you reduce the dollar value of his time, he accepts more cases, either cases with lower chance of success or lower expected payout. More lawsuits means more employed lawyers.
So if you don’t change anything else but you do reduce the dollar value of lawyer time, you get more people employed doing legal work, right?
You can also imagine some longer-term scenario where, since being a lawyer is less lucrative, there are fewer resources invested in creating laws and regulations that make work for lawyers.
The issue with the large number of lawyers in the US isn't that they are doing useless work, it's that our system is set up such that a lot more legal work is required to get anything done that in other systems. So the ideal reform would be to find a way to be more like the other developed countries that get by with fewer lawyers, but failing that it's a perfectly reasonable policy to want even more lawyers, since that makes hiring them more affordable for everyone who needs one. Plus, job creation!
I agree that demand-side reform would be good, but until we get there I think supply-side reform will actually make things worse. Everyone who’s doing zero-sum legal work is not available to work in other positive sum fields.
By analogy: Would a carbon tax be a good way to reduce carbon emissions? Sure. But assuming you don’t have a carbon tax, should you be aggressively trying to break up fossil fuel cartels to lower prices and increase output? Maybe not?
My point though is that in the absence of demand-side reform, that legal work is not actually zero sum. It may be stupid that all this legal work is required in order to get anything done in America, but it really is required.
Seems like the proposal is to legislate by anecdote. Is there any evidence that life coaches have more misbehavior than other licensed professions? And anyway, it sounds like the wrongdoers here are indeed getting punished, so it's not clear how licensing would change that.
I think there's a big [citation needed] on the theory that licensing prevents scams. Do we even have evidence that life coaches are more likely to scam than the general public? As I said, it seems like legislation by anecdote. Never a good way to form beliefs.
Regarding this particular case: It seems to me that if she weren't able to label herself a "life coach", she would have gone with "spiritual coach", or "life mentor", or "personal guide", or some other thing, and the outcome would have otherwise been identical. And also, the system seems to be working here, in that she is facing consequences, so I'm not really sure what the problem is?
While I agree that it shouldn't be illegal to cut hair without a license, I disagree with the implied mood that there's no way it could require training or expertise to do well. ("‘Unqualified’ students? That’s not a thing, this is hair.") As someone with a lot of hair that is difficult to care for, even expensive salons have given me poor advice/done poor work. Would love to see better means of discriminating been high and low quality work as a customer in the haircare market.
I definitely do NOT think Zvi believes that cutting or styling hair well does not require training or expertise. I DO think that he thinks that the specific training required by licensing regimes is unnecessary, e.g. lots of people acquire that training and expertise via 'unofficial channels' (like friends or family or YouTube).
I would assume that those expensive salons are properly licensed. Therefore, the fact that you received bad outcomes anyway demonstrates the *lack* of value from such hair licensing, no? Clearly they weren't qualified to work with your particular hair.
I wouldn't mind seeing optional add-on certification for various businesses...sort of the way organic or fair trade exist for foods. A salon, or perhaps individual hairdressers, that passes the difficult Harrowing Hair Exam (proctored by Ms. Frizzle) would be a sign of such quality work. Of course, it may end up being the case in some industries that there isn't enough market to justify offering a provably superiour service...like I doubt the marginal SuperCuts would care, and there's a lot of their ilk. But mandating that every salon adhere to such high standards means many of them close or never open in the first place, which seems like a poor outcome too. Just like outlawing SROs contributed to homelessness...
In the UK, you can do most electrical work yourself. There’s a couple of things you need to be a qualified electrician trichina for, like replacing the fuse box (which I recently had done for my house).
During the pandemic, I was looking up who is allowed to do Portable Appliance Testing, and I think I’m allowed to do it myself (but this is not legal advice). So there I was, almost alone in a data centre with the usual ops staff unable to come in due to (hypothesised) risk of contracting covid, and I’m being the rack monkey who replaces servers when they fail … and I *think*: should the PAT testing on this stuff expire, I’m allowed to test it myself with the appropriate test gear and put a sticker on it.
In the case of music therapists, the emphasis is presumably on the “therapist” part, not the “music” part. (Therapists are unregulated in the UK). In the sense that they’re giving professional advice to patients.
Above is a hypothetical example, deliberately chosen to be unlikely to work.
I forget the citation now, but there’s a paper that basically goes “we evaluated music therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome by comparing it to (a) no treatment (b) cognitive behavioural therapy, which is the currently recommended treatment. And, uh, never mind the music therapy, CBT also doesn’t work”
To be clear, I am all for publishing papers of the general form “I am shocked, shocked, to discover that this result from the psychology literature failed to replicate.”
As a CFS sufferer, I'm shocked, shocked I tell you that the recommended treatment for a chronic physical ailment in whatever region that is was psychological. (yes, it is a condition exacerbated by stress so psychological stuff can help on the margin, but that's like recommending CBT for heart attack prevention). Still, beats the many years where the default was to recommend an actively damaging physical exercise regime
The Bar Exam is good, actually. I think the alternative, diploma privilege, is significantly worse and if we got rid of one I'd get rid of the law school graduation requirement before the bar exam.
We need some barriers to entry.
Let's just start off with what lawyers do. Occupational regulation for florists ought to be less than that for neurosurgeons; where does law fall? Should we regulate entry at all?
Lawyers have different skills that apply to different types of work. Trust and estates lawyers need to know their field well, but don't need a lot of courtroom moxie. Criminal lawyers on both sides are sometimes not technically expert, but need to be good in court and really desperately need to be good at evidence. Civil lawyers need strong research skills. Family law lawyers need to be able to navigate both the law and their clients' emotional states. Some states require a real estate lawyer to buy or sell real estate; this tends to be pro forma work and the systemic losses almost certainly exceed the gains from such laws.
If you let anyone be a lawyer, the courts will be clogged with nuisances and the already-difficult efforts to find a good lawyer head to hopelessness. This isn't dog-walking or hair-braiding; neither is it knee surgery. If you (you=reader here, not you=anyone) give me nine months, I could make you a functional lawyer in one field. But people who represent themselves often violate basic rules and use up a ton of court time. (This isn't always true, and some hearings are basically designed to handle people representing themselves - small claims, restraining orders, sometimes child support compliance, etc. Plus some who represent themselves are very good.)
We probably don't want (more) people convicted of crimes because their lawyers were bad. We don't want kids in hazardous situations. Lawyering matters.
Very few lawyers are genuinely competent in multiple fields. Lawyers who decide to take that one case outside their field are typically making a serious error. But both law school and the bar are designed for a much wider range of knowledge.
The usual take of the bar abolitionists is that the exam does not improve lawyering. To me, the most solid of the critiques is that the bar isn't like practicing law because lawyering is open-book - I mean, sometimes I don't know things. This is a crucial skill, and lawyering is largely an open book exam.
But not totally. If you're doing in-court hearings, you'd best know your evidence code. When surprises strike, what do you do? What motions are available? What are the basic rules? What are the procedural rules of court that will bite you if you disobey them? When the judge is making his own motion - required by law - to dismiss some defendants, maybe you've done something wrong.
The bar exam is written differently in different jurisdictions and sets a different standard in different jurisdictions. I view this as (probably) a feature; states ought to be working toward maximizing their results.
And, look, it's undeniable that people fail the bar exam who would make perfectly fine lawyers.
The former elected DA of Near-me County failed the bar six times; I know this because this is one of her go-to stories. A Stanford dean failed. People fail. And some of them doubtless shouldn't fail; the bar is a test of minimum competence - can you hold some information in your head and answer questions about it? Can you analyze your way accurately? But people who are highly qualified nonetheless fail, and people who would have become assets to the bar fail and can't be attorneys. This is bad.
Further, the bar is likely a poor proxy for determining if you are going to steal your clients' money. Some people pass the bar who are dreadful.
But the alternative to bar exams is nothing - which I reject - or diploma privilege. (Or some very seldom used apprenticeship routes.)
Is law school really a better proxy?
I'd tell you what the usual argument is for law school as better than the bar, but there isn't a clearly articulated one I could find. This is likely because the presumption of law school remains very strong. Law school is supposed to teach analytical thinking and also shows a certain degree of diligence. But if you have a proper test, you can test analytical thinking and sufficient diligence to learn the material on the test. Law schools have different goals depending on their student population, but if the goal is "competence at lawyering," maybe [redacted famous Harvard professor - not that one, and no not that one either] shouldn't be teaching you.
I think the best argument is that law school ought to teach some degree of oral advocacy and also that the manner of legal thinking is ingrained in future lawyers. Getting through three (or, if going to my alma mater Bob's Waffles and Law - no law parking during breakfast hours - four) years of doing something and passing tests shows a certain interest in the craft. Persistence and repeatability surely matter. I have very little doubt that law school is a benefit and in many cases a very substantial benefit.
But at what cost? Are you telling me that a person *who could ace the bar exam* wouldn't have more benefit from three years as a lawyer as they would in law school? That's also comfortably in the six digits as far as financial situation. (I know judges with law school debt.)
Further, if you have diploma privilege, are you going to give it to all schools? Are you going to close down California's system of slightly dodgy, sometimes cheap, law schools? If you create a diploma privilege, you can't let these schools grant you lawyerhood if you want any quality control - some of them are bad. Diploma privilege necessarily requires strong accreditation procedures.
If you're going to have a gateway to the profession, both an exam and law school provide some showing of competence. Providing a bonus to law school graduates on the bar exam is probably a plus position. But diploma privilege is likely to lead to some greater abuses.
Wisconsin has diploma privilege, but the express reason for that is to prevent Wisconsonites from moving. It's also only for in-state schools. Your U. Chicago law degree can go in the trash, but you're in if you went to Marquette. Let's not pretend this is designed as anything other than in-state protectionism.
Thirty-year-olds are better lawyers than 25-year-olds, who would be better than 21-year-olds if there were a bunch of 21-year-old lawyers. Law school delays entry into the profession until the reaching of a more mature age. But my suggestion wouldn't result in ordinary 21-year-olds being lawyers. Further, they'd have nine years experience when they were 30, and most would be specialists.
Finally, note the systemic incentives. Law schools have a strong incentive to maximize the value of law schools. They're not going to endorse this. Lawyers generally have an interest in reducing entry into the field. Optimizing for entry can't be open season (says me), so we have to find ways to properly screen. Neither law school nor the bar exam is a perfect solution, but privileging educational attainment over actual knowledge doesn't sound like the right thing to do.
Limited purpose licenses for narrow areas of law are probably a good thing but I think I've run rather long as it is.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Aren't all of the objections that you bring up available to the consumer to evaulate? If clients don't demand bar exam certificates, diplomas from good schools, age or experience, etc., why should the government force the issue, other than perhaps mandating disclosure of these things?
Can the risk of malpractice be mitigated just by requiring insurance?
Good question! I don't think so. That's a considerable tax on the consumer. It also assumes sophisticated consumers, which isn't always accurate.
Let's take criminal defense work. It's approximately as hard in most jurisdictions to successfully sue your defense attorney as it is to sue the prosecutor, which is to say VERY HARD. Now, OK, maybe some appeal or writ solves your problem but that's while you were spending six years in prison. This is generally considered an adverse outcome. [citation needed]
Insurance, even if required, would be very cheap in the criminal field assuming the laws stayed the same on that. (And changing the rules to make suing your criminal defense attorney easier to sue has downsides.)
Attorneys represent kids in the foster care system. Are we going to fix that with insurance?
And one of my objections survives: In many jurisdictions, the courts are overtaxed. If you allow anyone to be a lawyer, that's going to get worse, and worse in a hurry. There are good arguments that unauthorized practice of law rules are overly strict in some jurisdictions/situations, but permitting anyone to be a lawyer is going to lead to a huge slowdown in cases and widespread problems. I mean, have you read Twitter?
The bar exam does not solve all this, but it mitigates it to some degree. (Diplomas do, too!)
You are forgetting to account for the rationalist need to assume they are smarter than everybody else and thus in no danger of being snared by someone who doesn't know what they are doing (which if they actually were capable, would mean they didn't fall into the rationalist cult in the first place).
The idea that you can simply use post-event insurance is bemusing because at best you are then reliant on the insurance companies to possess the knowledge of who to insure, thus trying to offload the work to a different third party than various diplomas and bar associations but doing so, as you noted, after you have already suffered significant harm.
> There is nothing wrong keeping people from other states from stealing construction business from already established, licensed and insured Florida contractors.
I would imagine this is unconstitutional under the dormant commerce clause. Wonder if there have been any / many legal challenges to such things?
The screenshot says “No criminal record prohibition” which I assume someone with a criminal record can apply for a magician license? Otherwise I agree with you.
You are right, that could be the right interpretation. Ambiguous!
Actually, look at the licensing requirements again. They say "No criminal record prohibitions," meaning that having a criminal record wont stop you.
I initially thought the same thing, but double checked
Great post. Another example: I discovered last year that in NYS it is illegal to "furnish information about the character of a person" for money, without a private investigator license.
https://x.com/louispotok/status/1731528223673180578
Podcast episode for this post:
https://open.substack.com/pub/dwatvpodcast/p/occupational-licensing-roundup-1?r=67y1h&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&showWelcomeOnShare=true
The CT governor’s hair thing has got to be a joke, right? Right?!
I think teachers should have to get licenses, personally. I think the tests should be free and universal throughout the US, but I do think that teachers should have to demonstrate a minimum amount of competence in their subject matter before teaching.
It seems like exams (rather than education requirements) are the fairest approach. Like, require the bar exam but not the law school.
As someone in education, I would care much more about teacher certification it teachers were anywhere near the top 25 problems with modern American education. It is unbelievable how little you need to know to be an effective primary education teacher. Controlling for classroom discipline(obviously this is a huge part of teaching but it's one of the least significant parts of certification), I am 90% sure anyone in this comment section could be an effective teacher in a real world environment with scarce months of mediocre training. No, these are not superstar teachers, but that's because those barely exist anyway. I've met almost none and I've met hundreds of teachers. Superstars don't really go into teaching.
I'm not necessarily disagreeing in theory, but in practice our existing teacher certification requirements have very little correlation with actual teacher quality.
One reason I would like to have some kind of quality control, is because there is information asymmetry and I have no expertise or ability to judge quality myself. In low-stakes professions (e.g. hair) that's fine, and quality doesn't really correlate with training. (Also, even if the woman whose haircut was awful spreads it 10 miles, I - as an infrequent consumer of hair cuts, and without a large social circle of such women - will never know it. I have online reviews of course, but those are gameable. Again for HAIR it's not that big a deal, but for medicine or law.... It's daunting to give that up.
How much of this can be substituted with insurance requirements, or via existing malpractice and review mechanisms?
Depends if the potential costs are fixable with money. If an accountant royally fucks up it might be life ruining, but it's also going to be purely monetary damages that can in theory be made whole by an insurance payout. When doctors fuck up, even a successful malpractice suit doesn't actually fix the harms
Another comment: wouldn't, in the case of law, doing away with the education requirement and keeping the exam be the fairer and less distortionary policy? The DEI nonsense aspect of it is that law school might still be required (i.e. someone sitting through 3 years of classes, which are not quality-controlled) and no independent, objective measure is not required - meaning that people who can't hack it on the test get a workaround. Tests or apprenticeships for skilled professions seem like reasonable compromises.
I agree with this (see my comment below) and I guess I shouldn't be surprised that Zvispace is where you find all-exam entry supporters, but this proposal is basically never raised and I don't think there's any organized support for it. But there should be!
There's another problem to no-bar rules.
I attended a non-ABA accredited night law school in Bakersfield. Of the eight of us who took the bar that year, all eight passed and two are judges. If you go with diploma privilege, you have to tightly accredit law schools and California's dodgier law schools will expire. Some of them, of course, should! But on the whole, California gains on this system.
I'd note that to be a trader, I had to pass a test called the Series 7 that I had to burn a week studying for to ensure I would pass it, and that seemed like a highly acceptable compromise, even though a bunch of the material on the test was pretty stupid/crazy/wrong.
I got a Series 7 license in 1990 so what I know might be dated, but I think that the law license should require more than a Series 7. When I took it, the questions were not all germane to what I needed to know but they had the results on a basically immediate turnaround, which is very different (probably necessarily) from the bar.
Traders who can't do basic things do much less societal harm than lawyers who can't lawyer.
The model you describe also applies for a CFA. Law does require more knowledge so doing the exam purely on self study would be very difficult but if you dropped the formal training requirement you could develop much shorter and more innovative training or people would do what some do in the UK and not study law at all but do what is essentially an apprenticeship, which is arguably even better.
Agreed that occupational licensing primarily works like a guild or a labor union, where any increased wages come along with deadweight loss due to lower output.
But I think the next step would be to think more about which are actually the sectors where lower output is bad.
Maybe you'd agree that a hypothetical restrictive occupational licensing regime for fortune tellers would be a good thing on net, since we’d ideally prefer to reduce the fraction of our population employed in fortune telling.
The question is, how much does our society benefit from having more people employed as lawyers? Is the marginal lawyer mostly getting paid to engage in mostly zero-sum work? (I’d also note that other developed economies manage to get by with many fewer lawyers per capita.)
(And very speculatively, how much of the work product of cosmetologists is fundamentally zero-sum?)
EDIT: More speculation, a highly restrictive occupational licensing regime for AI researchers would be bullish for the future of humanity I think?
We don’t lack lawyers but they’re too damn expensive. Whatever the optimal output is, let competition determine who gets to stay in the business. Licensing doesn’t so much control output as it prevents foreign lawyers from establishing office or taking in-house jobs at lower compensation than their rentseeking US counterparts are willing to. The licensing hoops don’t actually limit output—there are already too many lawyers who can jump through them. They keep the prices up for the benefit of a domestic guild.
See Dean Baker’s Rigged (free book) where he argues other common law countries’ lawyers should be abe to practice in the US due to similarities between legal systems.
https://deanbaker.net/books/rigged.htm
If you do occupational licensing reform that successfully reduces lawyer wages, I don’t see how that’s separable from increasing lawyer employment. I think you can only reduce wages this way if you’re also increasing the supply of lawyers.
Or, thinking about it backwards, when I go to an attorney and ask him to take my case as plaintiff, he assesses whether his 33% contingency fee will be worth it, as (chance of success x how much he’ll earn on success) vs. (the time he’ll be required to spend x the dollar value of his time). As you reduce the dollar value of his time, he accepts more cases, either cases with lower chance of success or lower expected payout. More lawsuits means more employed lawyers.
So if you don’t change anything else but you do reduce the dollar value of lawyer time, you get more people employed doing legal work, right?
Yeah that sounds right. I can imagine that more lawyers wouldn’t be so bad if they were more affordable. But point taken.
You can also imagine some longer-term scenario where, since being a lawyer is less lucrative, there are fewer resources invested in creating laws and regulations that make work for lawyers.
Actually I was thinking like that — by analogy with increasingly obsolete or niche occupations.
The issue with the large number of lawyers in the US isn't that they are doing useless work, it's that our system is set up such that a lot more legal work is required to get anything done that in other systems. So the ideal reform would be to find a way to be more like the other developed countries that get by with fewer lawyers, but failing that it's a perfectly reasonable policy to want even more lawyers, since that makes hiring them more affordable for everyone who needs one. Plus, job creation!
I agree that demand-side reform would be good, but until we get there I think supply-side reform will actually make things worse. Everyone who’s doing zero-sum legal work is not available to work in other positive sum fields.
By analogy: Would a carbon tax be a good way to reduce carbon emissions? Sure. But assuming you don’t have a carbon tax, should you be aggressively trying to break up fossil fuel cartels to lower prices and increase output? Maybe not?
My point though is that in the absence of demand-side reform, that legal work is not actually zero sum. It may be stupid that all this legal work is required in order to get anything done in America, but it really is required.
Zvi, what’s your take on this re licensing?
https://www.propublica.org/article/utah-therapists-life-coaches-regulation
Edit: There is a link to a podcast in the post. I commented before reading the whole thing. I still am.
Seems like the proposal is to legislate by anecdote. Is there any evidence that life coaches have more misbehavior than other licensed professions? And anyway, it sounds like the wrongdoers here are indeed getting punished, so it's not clear how licensing would change that.
Licensing in theory would prevent abusive, scammy life coaches from practicing in the first place.
One of the life coaches in the article had her therapist licence removed so she pivoted to life coaching and abusing victims.
I think there's a big [citation needed] on the theory that licensing prevents scams. Do we even have evidence that life coaches are more likely to scam than the general public? As I said, it seems like legislation by anecdote. Never a good way to form beliefs.
Regarding this particular case: It seems to me that if she weren't able to label herself a "life coach", she would have gone with "spiritual coach", or "life mentor", or "personal guide", or some other thing, and the outcome would have otherwise been identical. And also, the system seems to be working here, in that she is facing consequences, so I'm not really sure what the problem is?
“Magick is not what its proponents claim to outsiders, but it is less fake than most people reading this think.”
Wasn’t expecting to find this line here, but I’m all for it.
While I agree that it shouldn't be illegal to cut hair without a license, I disagree with the implied mood that there's no way it could require training or expertise to do well. ("‘Unqualified’ students? That’s not a thing, this is hair.") As someone with a lot of hair that is difficult to care for, even expensive salons have given me poor advice/done poor work. Would love to see better means of discriminating been high and low quality work as a customer in the haircare market.
I definitely do NOT think Zvi believes that cutting or styling hair well does not require training or expertise. I DO think that he thinks that the specific training required by licensing regimes is unnecessary, e.g. lots of people acquire that training and expertise via 'unofficial channels' (like friends or family or YouTube).
I would assume that those expensive salons are properly licensed. Therefore, the fact that you received bad outcomes anyway demonstrates the *lack* of value from such hair licensing, no? Clearly they weren't qualified to work with your particular hair.
I wouldn't mind seeing optional add-on certification for various businesses...sort of the way organic or fair trade exist for foods. A salon, or perhaps individual hairdressers, that passes the difficult Harrowing Hair Exam (proctored by Ms. Frizzle) would be a sign of such quality work. Of course, it may end up being the case in some industries that there isn't enough market to justify offering a provably superiour service...like I doubt the marginal SuperCuts would care, and there's a lot of their ilk. But mandating that every salon adhere to such high standards means many of them close or never open in the first place, which seems like a poor outcome too. Just like outlawing SROs contributed to homelessness...
Your doing good work with these blogs, love the roll call of shamefully stupid occupational license requirements. Shout it from the rooftops.
In the UK, you can do most electrical work yourself. There’s a couple of things you need to be a qualified electrician trichina for, like replacing the fuse box (which I recently had done for my house).
During the pandemic, I was looking up who is allowed to do Portable Appliance Testing, and I think I’m allowed to do it myself (but this is not legal advice). So there I was, almost alone in a data centre with the usual ops staff unable to come in due to (hypothesised) risk of contracting covid, and I’m being the rack monkey who replaces servers when they fail … and I *think*: should the PAT testing on this stuff expire, I’m allowed to test it myself with the appropriate test gear and put a sticker on it.
In the case of music therapists, the emphasis is presumably on the “therapist” part, not the “music” part. (Therapists are unregulated in the UK). In the sense that they’re giving professional advice to patients.
Like, e.g. you want to claim that you can cure schizophrenia with music.
Above is a hypothetical example, deliberately chosen to be unlikely to work.
I forget the citation now, but there’s a paper that basically goes “we evaluated music therapy for chronic fatigue syndrome by comparing it to (a) no treatment (b) cognitive behavioural therapy, which is the currently recommended treatment. And, uh, never mind the music therapy, CBT also doesn’t work”
To be clear, I am all for publishing papers of the general form “I am shocked, shocked, to discover that this result from the psychology literature failed to replicate.”
As a CFS sufferer, I'm shocked, shocked I tell you that the recommended treatment for a chronic physical ailment in whatever region that is was psychological. (yes, it is a condition exacerbated by stress so psychological stuff can help on the margin, but that's like recommending CBT for heart attack prevention). Still, beats the many years where the default was to recommend an actively damaging physical exercise regime
The Bar Exam is good, actually. I think the alternative, diploma privilege, is significantly worse and if we got rid of one I'd get rid of the law school graduation requirement before the bar exam.
We need some barriers to entry.
Let's just start off with what lawyers do. Occupational regulation for florists ought to be less than that for neurosurgeons; where does law fall? Should we regulate entry at all?
Lawyers have different skills that apply to different types of work. Trust and estates lawyers need to know their field well, but don't need a lot of courtroom moxie. Criminal lawyers on both sides are sometimes not technically expert, but need to be good in court and really desperately need to be good at evidence. Civil lawyers need strong research skills. Family law lawyers need to be able to navigate both the law and their clients' emotional states. Some states require a real estate lawyer to buy or sell real estate; this tends to be pro forma work and the systemic losses almost certainly exceed the gains from such laws.
If you let anyone be a lawyer, the courts will be clogged with nuisances and the already-difficult efforts to find a good lawyer head to hopelessness. This isn't dog-walking or hair-braiding; neither is it knee surgery. If you (you=reader here, not you=anyone) give me nine months, I could make you a functional lawyer in one field. But people who represent themselves often violate basic rules and use up a ton of court time. (This isn't always true, and some hearings are basically designed to handle people representing themselves - small claims, restraining orders, sometimes child support compliance, etc. Plus some who represent themselves are very good.)
We probably don't want (more) people convicted of crimes because their lawyers were bad. We don't want kids in hazardous situations. Lawyering matters.
Very few lawyers are genuinely competent in multiple fields. Lawyers who decide to take that one case outside their field are typically making a serious error. But both law school and the bar are designed for a much wider range of knowledge.
The usual take of the bar abolitionists is that the exam does not improve lawyering. To me, the most solid of the critiques is that the bar isn't like practicing law because lawyering is open-book - I mean, sometimes I don't know things. This is a crucial skill, and lawyering is largely an open book exam.
But not totally. If you're doing in-court hearings, you'd best know your evidence code. When surprises strike, what do you do? What motions are available? What are the basic rules? What are the procedural rules of court that will bite you if you disobey them? When the judge is making his own motion - required by law - to dismiss some defendants, maybe you've done something wrong.
The bar exam is written differently in different jurisdictions and sets a different standard in different jurisdictions. I view this as (probably) a feature; states ought to be working toward maximizing their results.
And, look, it's undeniable that people fail the bar exam who would make perfectly fine lawyers.
The former elected DA of Near-me County failed the bar six times; I know this because this is one of her go-to stories. A Stanford dean failed. People fail. And some of them doubtless shouldn't fail; the bar is a test of minimum competence - can you hold some information in your head and answer questions about it? Can you analyze your way accurately? But people who are highly qualified nonetheless fail, and people who would have become assets to the bar fail and can't be attorneys. This is bad.
Further, the bar is likely a poor proxy for determining if you are going to steal your clients' money. Some people pass the bar who are dreadful.
But the alternative to bar exams is nothing - which I reject - or diploma privilege. (Or some very seldom used apprenticeship routes.)
Is law school really a better proxy?
I'd tell you what the usual argument is for law school as better than the bar, but there isn't a clearly articulated one I could find. This is likely because the presumption of law school remains very strong. Law school is supposed to teach analytical thinking and also shows a certain degree of diligence. But if you have a proper test, you can test analytical thinking and sufficient diligence to learn the material on the test. Law schools have different goals depending on their student population, but if the goal is "competence at lawyering," maybe [redacted famous Harvard professor - not that one, and no not that one either] shouldn't be teaching you.
I think the best argument is that law school ought to teach some degree of oral advocacy and also that the manner of legal thinking is ingrained in future lawyers. Getting through three (or, if going to my alma mater Bob's Waffles and Law - no law parking during breakfast hours - four) years of doing something and passing tests shows a certain interest in the craft. Persistence and repeatability surely matter. I have very little doubt that law school is a benefit and in many cases a very substantial benefit.
But at what cost? Are you telling me that a person *who could ace the bar exam* wouldn't have more benefit from three years as a lawyer as they would in law school? That's also comfortably in the six digits as far as financial situation. (I know judges with law school debt.)
Further, if you have diploma privilege, are you going to give it to all schools? Are you going to close down California's system of slightly dodgy, sometimes cheap, law schools? If you create a diploma privilege, you can't let these schools grant you lawyerhood if you want any quality control - some of them are bad. Diploma privilege necessarily requires strong accreditation procedures.
If you're going to have a gateway to the profession, both an exam and law school provide some showing of competence. Providing a bonus to law school graduates on the bar exam is probably a plus position. But diploma privilege is likely to lead to some greater abuses.
Wisconsin has diploma privilege, but the express reason for that is to prevent Wisconsonites from moving. It's also only for in-state schools. Your U. Chicago law degree can go in the trash, but you're in if you went to Marquette. Let's not pretend this is designed as anything other than in-state protectionism.
Thirty-year-olds are better lawyers than 25-year-olds, who would be better than 21-year-olds if there were a bunch of 21-year-old lawyers. Law school delays entry into the profession until the reaching of a more mature age. But my suggestion wouldn't result in ordinary 21-year-olds being lawyers. Further, they'd have nine years experience when they were 30, and most would be specialists.
Finally, note the systemic incentives. Law schools have a strong incentive to maximize the value of law schools. They're not going to endorse this. Lawyers generally have an interest in reducing entry into the field. Optimizing for entry can't be open season (says me), so we have to find ways to properly screen. Neither law school nor the bar exam is a perfect solution, but privileging educational attainment over actual knowledge doesn't sound like the right thing to do.
Limited purpose licenses for narrow areas of law are probably a good thing but I think I've run rather long as it is.
Of course, that's just my opinion. I could be wrong.
Appreciate the lengthy post - I'm not in law - or the US - but found it interesting as an outsider!
Aren't all of the objections that you bring up available to the consumer to evaulate? If clients don't demand bar exam certificates, diplomas from good schools, age or experience, etc., why should the government force the issue, other than perhaps mandating disclosure of these things?
Can the risk of malpractice be mitigated just by requiring insurance?
Good question! I don't think so. That's a considerable tax on the consumer. It also assumes sophisticated consumers, which isn't always accurate.
Let's take criminal defense work. It's approximately as hard in most jurisdictions to successfully sue your defense attorney as it is to sue the prosecutor, which is to say VERY HARD. Now, OK, maybe some appeal or writ solves your problem but that's while you were spending six years in prison. This is generally considered an adverse outcome. [citation needed]
Insurance, even if required, would be very cheap in the criminal field assuming the laws stayed the same on that. (And changing the rules to make suing your criminal defense attorney easier to sue has downsides.)
Attorneys represent kids in the foster care system. Are we going to fix that with insurance?
And one of my objections survives: In many jurisdictions, the courts are overtaxed. If you allow anyone to be a lawyer, that's going to get worse, and worse in a hurry. There are good arguments that unauthorized practice of law rules are overly strict in some jurisdictions/situations, but permitting anyone to be a lawyer is going to lead to a huge slowdown in cases and widespread problems. I mean, have you read Twitter?
The bar exam does not solve all this, but it mitigates it to some degree. (Diplomas do, too!)
You are forgetting to account for the rationalist need to assume they are smarter than everybody else and thus in no danger of being snared by someone who doesn't know what they are doing (which if they actually were capable, would mean they didn't fall into the rationalist cult in the first place).
The idea that you can simply use post-event insurance is bemusing because at best you are then reliant on the insurance companies to possess the knowledge of who to insure, thus trying to offload the work to a different third party than various diplomas and bar associations but doing so, as you noted, after you have already suffered significant harm.
And yet we find good restaurants. Also, none of these really argue against keeping the test and scrapping the formal education requirements.
> There is nothing wrong keeping people from other states from stealing construction business from already established, licensed and insured Florida contractors.
I would imagine this is unconstitutional under the dormant commerce clause. Wonder if there have been any / many legal challenges to such things?