
Technological Change and Obsolete Skills: Evidence from Men’s Pro Tennis (2017) [pdf] - samclemens
http://individual.utoronto.ca/jhall/documents/TennisTechChange.pdf
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repsilat
The money quote from the end of the introduction:

>> _We find that the introduction of the new composite racquets temporarily
helped younger players at the expense of older players, reduced the rank
correlation in player quality over time, and increased exit rates of older
players relative to younger players. We find that these effects last for two
to four generations of players._

Pretty cool, fun, interesting study. I hope the authors leave it to the reader
to make sweeping generalisations/extrapolations from their results. (Still
reading.)

Edit: generalisations are pleasantly restrained. I found the supporting
statistics much more interesting than the mathematical modelling. Maybe I just
don't have the patience for the latter, but I'm not sure it really lends more
credibility to the study's conclusions.

~~~
p1esk
No doubt new technology has been important, but there might have been another
significant factor influencing generational changes: the number of aspiring
pro players. This number has increased dramatically in the last 30 years, but
in the paper they only consider the number of successful players (roughly
equivalent to the top X ATP rankings, where X is somewhere between 200 and
500). X has also been increasing, but at much lower rate, and as a result
there are vastly more people competing for those X spots today than in 1980.
It could be that to get into the top 100 today is as hard as it was to get
into top 10 thirty years ago.

As the natural selection gets more brutal, new players have to develop new,
more effective skills to succeed.

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nopinsight
Since upcoming changes in skill requirements for good jobs could be more rapid
than in the past, we need to teach many more people how to learn faster and
better.

I wonder if there are startups or programs from institution with a focus on
this. I am aware of a popular course "Learning How to Learn" on Coursera. But
it seems like an app that interactively helps people to apply this sort of
lessons on a concrete set of materials (e.g. Finance, Cardiology,
Microprocessor Design, Software Design, etc.) would be even more useful.

[https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-
learn](https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn)

~~~
rhizome
_Since upcoming changes in skill requirements for good jobs could be more
rapid than in the past, we need to teach many more people how to learn faster
and better._

Why not teach the same number of people to be 10x? ;)

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notacoward
Practically all of the graphs show that the trends they attribute to new
racquets were already evident before that introduction. Given the size of the
pro tour, it wouldn't take too large a cadre of young hot shots to explain the
results independently of racquet technology, and those players' ever advancing
age would better explain the U shape of those curves. Indeed this is when
McEnroe, Connors, Lendl, and Wilander were all coming to the fore. The
evidence for the authors' hypothesis seems extremely weak.

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pasabagi
It's an interesting study - but tennis is fundamentally a very bad model for
understanding the impact of technology on the employment market. A better
tennis player does not produce more 'tennis' than a bad player. So, no matter
how the technology changes, the number of tennis players required is
unaffected.

Technological change in the workplace almost always refers to technology that
makes a worker more productive. Since the demand for most things is constant,
this means you need less workers for a given product. So, the problem would
not be old workers being worse at their jobs - the problem would be that,
absent external factors, there would be less jobs around.

~~~
p1esk
It's not always about "producing more". This tennis model is relevant to
scenarios where the job is getting harder with time (e.g. building better
computer chips, or performing more complicated brain surgeries).

