The Need for More Multidisciplinary Skills from Professionals
At his Harvard Law School 50th reunion, Munger delivers a Socratic analysis of why broadscale professionals need more multidisciplinary skill. He argues that professional silo education produces systematic cognitive dysfunction — the 'man with a hammer' syndrome — and calls for elite soft-science education to incorporate models from all disciplines.
“The talk proceeds through each question with characteristic Munger rigor, drawing on Shaw, psychology, physics, and the history of science to build the case that professional education systematically fails its students by training them only in the tools of one discipline — and that this failure has enormous costs for society. *For the complete text, see Poor Charlie's Almanack, Chapter 4, Talk Five (pages 308–340 in the expanded third edition).*”
Delivered at the Fiftieth Reunion of the Harvard Law School Class of 1948, April 24, 1998. Published as Talk Five in Poor Charlie's Almanack (2005).
Today I am going to engage in a game reminding us of our old professors: Socratic solitaire. I will ask and briefly answer five questions:
- Do broadscale professionals need more multidisciplinary skill?
- Was our education sufficiently multidisciplinary?
- In elite broadscale soft science, what is the essential nature of practicable best-form multidisciplinary education?
- In the last fifty years, how far has elite academia progressed toward attainable best-form multidisciplinarity?
- What educational practices would make progress faster?
The talk proceeds through each question with characteristic Munger rigor, drawing on Shaw, psychology, physics, and the history of science to build the case that professional education systematically fails its students by training them only in the tools of one discipline — and that this failure has enormous costs for society.
For the complete text, see Poor Charlie's Almanack, Chapter 4, Talk Five (pages 308–340 in the expanded third edition).