Very recently we were able to read about how the economic recovery (not in Spain though! 
) was amplifying the increase in the inventories all along the value chain: the bullwhip effect.
As during the last quarter I’ve been thinking and discussing about the educational value chain (from primary school to continuous education after graduation, mainly at work), I’ve found this bullwhip effect can be in place too. We have to take into account that as part of the educational value chain, we professors are part of the machinery that converts students with X competences, skills and knowledge into students with Y competences, skills and knowledge, where Y > X (I hope!). Is this process totally optimised. Our guess is NO!; (1) we need to analyse how the transformation process is developed, to set goals and effectiveness and efficiency indexes be calculated to allow optimisation of every phase, and (2) coordinate the various phases of the educational life in order to optimise the whole chain.
Overqualification?: that’s what I would call the ‘educational bullwhip effect’, and one of the answers would be it is due to lack of the coordination (above #2).
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It seems so if we read Freakonomics, by Steven Levitt & Stephen Dubner. When I first read the book, almost three years ago I couldn’t believe someone had messed about with an attribute that follows us from birth to death: our own name. The hipothesis to test was if the forename was linked to success in adult life; the authors analysed data from California and they found these results:
- Your forename is not a determinant of your [life economic] success. Instead, we have to look at it as a predictor, reason being it tells us more about how the parents are like. You got it?.
- Names move in cycles around the different socioeconomic strata around time; one name today is considered for higher income children, in many years could be will be considered for lower ones.
Besides that, I would add, many names will give us more ‘raw data’ to analyse than others, such us mine (Francisco, from Spain). If we have a look to the Spanish Census data, from Spanish National Statistics (INE), we’ll notice for every 1,000…
- Spaniards, 30 are called like me.
- borned in 1970s (my decade), 14 are called like me.
- living in Castellón (my province), 25 are called like me.
- inhabitants, 26 are called like me; Francisco is the 4th used name after Antonio, Jose, and Manuel.
So, do I have to change my name?. You know me, always kidding! 
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"Sometimes I think a Virtual Personal Optimisation Layer acting in our life would improve our lives. Then I recall BRAIN should act like this… What the heck! Brain is faulty!"
Me (Now)
Interesting: Neuroeconomics at MIT.
Interesting too, although in Spanish: Brain is an evolutionary patch.
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