The Art of Manliness - #138： Reviving Practical Wisdom with Barry Schwartz

00:00:00.000 we're at mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast we've

00:00:19.440 probably all seen instances on the news or even in our own lives where we've seen rules and

00:00:24.100 regulations enforced that just didn't make any sense for a particular situation what's funny and

00:00:30.860 tragic at the same time is the people enforcing these rules and regulations and particular

00:00:35.800 situations will tell themselves and even other people like this doesn't make any sense but i have

00:00:40.840 to do it because that's what the rules say my hands are tied and you probably see this in your own life

00:00:45.340 you see some bureaucracies school systems probably in large corporations you probably work at a job

00:00:51.640 where your company has just a weird rule that just doesn't make any sense but you have to abide

00:00:57.000 by it because uh that's what the rule is or you'll get fired it was my guest today on the podcast

00:01:02.380 co-authored a book where they make the case that we've let rules and regulations swallow our lives

00:01:08.620 and this has resulted in us losing the ability to use wisdom his name is barry schwartz he's the

00:01:15.660 co-author of the book practical wisdom the right way to do the right thing and he discusses what's

00:01:21.620 happened in the past i mean really this past 75 years where rules and regulations have enveloped

00:01:27.900 our lives the ill effects of that and then he makes the case that we need to go back to what

00:01:33.800 aristotle championed as as the way to make decisions in our in our life and that is using

00:01:40.040 what he called phronesis or roughly translated to practical wisdom so today on the podcast we're

00:01:47.400 going to discuss what practical wisdom is how we can nurture it in our own lives and the lives of

00:01:52.400 our children and why this would be beneficial to us personally and to us as a society as a whole

00:01:57.840 really fascinating discussion we get into some great psychology and philosophy so without further

00:02:02.320 ado barry schwartz practical wisdom barry schwartz welcome to the show thanks so your book you wrote

00:02:17.380 along with kennis sharp a few years ago is called practical wisdom and it's about how to confront

00:02:22.740 problems or how to solve problems or make decisions we'll get into exactly what practical wisdom is in a

00:02:28.180 bit but before we do that let's talk about how people societies uh particularly modern bureaucratic

00:02:35.260 societies how do we go about solving problems and making improvements and why how come sometimes

00:02:42.160 these tools that we use don't work well i think we have increasingly uh come to rely on a model

00:02:51.940 where decision making is basically done by rules experts of some kind self-appointed or otherwise come up

00:03:01.160 with a set of procedures a set of rules that everyone is supposed to follow to make decisions to make

00:03:06.580 judgments and then you basically bring people on and their task is to follow the rules uh this is a

00:03:14.280 reflection of a lack of confidence in the judgment of the people who who you're giving the rules to

00:03:20.580 so i'm an expert i make rules i hand them to you you don't need to be an expert you just follow the

00:03:25.640 i created and i think we've come to rely more and more more and more on that partly because if you let

00:03:34.000 people use their judgment and they have bad judgment they'll screw up partly i think to protect against

00:03:40.900 favoritism and bias if you treat every situation exactly the same way you can't be accused of being

00:03:48.180 biased so imagine a school teacher who has to follow a script in teaching her second grade class

00:03:55.040 uh the virtue of following a script is that she can't be accused by some parent of uh of liking

00:04:01.280 this student more than that student of giving this student extra attention compared to that student so

00:04:06.960 she retreats behind the fact that she follows exactly the same procedure with everyone so she can't 1.00

00:04:12.440 be accused of bias or favoritism so i think that's increasingly the way we do things uh and the

00:04:18.980 problem with it is that life is complicated especially life that involves interaction with

00:04:23.940 other human beings and there really is no one size fits all set of rules or procedures that works

00:04:32.500 so what happens when you follow rules is that you kind of get the mediocre solution to every problem

00:04:38.380 never the best solution it's an insurance policy against a disaster in case you use your judgment

00:04:44.760 and your judgment judgment is bad but it also pretty much guarantees that you'll never get it exactly

00:04:50.320 right uh and i think really think that that's uh that that's a pity um uh you we need to appreciate

00:04:57.680 that basically every situation is importantly different from the ones we've had experience with before

00:05:04.540 and we need to use our judgment to see whether to bend the rules how to bend the rules whether to

00:05:09.880 ignore the rules and stuff like that can you point to specific examples where uh perhaps administrative

00:05:15.720 rules or stringent laws uh have gotten in the way of actually created you know mediocre results

00:05:22.120 well i mean i think we're now seeing this played out a lot in the press the uh draconian policies we

00:05:29.400 have for incarcerating uh non-violent criminals typically drug for drug offenses um was a disaster

00:05:38.500 you know everybody uh you you you have a certain amount of weight and you have to go to jail for a

00:05:44.620 certain amount of time and if it's your third offense they basically lock you up and they throw away

00:05:48.460 the key uh sometimes this is an appropriate penalty sometimes it's ridiculous and uh and i think the

00:05:55.320 reason this was imposed is that there was a sense that judges were soft on criminals and they were

00:06:00.880 going to make it so that judges couldn't be soft on criminals because they had these guidelines that

00:06:05.820 they had to follow um the only reason we're starting now to abandon this is that we've you know like half

00:06:13.000 the citizens of the united states are in jail we've got we've got the worst prison population in the

00:06:19.400 entire world yeah and it's decimated the african-american community it's decimated the african-american 0.97

00:06:24.740 community it's decimated state budgets you know it costs three times as much to incarcerate somebody

00:06:30.080 as it does to educate somebody it's just it's just uh uh ridiculous so there are these cases uh examples

00:06:38.220 for we write about it in the book of drug courts where you come before a judge specifically with drug

00:06:45.160 offenses and the drug and the judge's set of possible um decisions have as much to do with

00:06:53.640 rehabilitation as with anything else do you have a job have you been seeing your counselor on a regular

00:06:59.060 basis and stuff like that so the rule book gets thrown away and the judges it's the judge can use

00:07:05.580 his discretion about just how hard to be uh with each uh perpetrator uh and they've had spectacular

00:07:15.020 success wherever where they've been tried it started in buffalo this guy just couldn't stand

00:07:21.080 especially there were so many veterans coming before him veterans who you know become psychological

00:07:27.780 casualties of of the war in iraq uh and he just couldn't bear locking them up so he decided we

00:07:35.660 got to do things differently and it transformed um the way in which these kinds of cases are handled

00:07:41.920 uh but you know this is the sort of thing it takes courage to introduce in your jurisdiction

00:07:47.600 um and and by the way if the judge didn't have good judgment this would not be a good program but he

00:07:54.740 does have good judgment yeah a lot of judges have complained that they have that these uh strict

00:07:59.820 rules are basically taking the judgment out of judging uh so that's one example yeah and i think

00:08:06.400 another example would be uh people often complain about like zero zero tolerance policy it's at schools

00:08:12.360 um i guess they've been shown like if a kid draws a gruesome war picture um sometimes get suspended

00:08:19.860 yeah yeah and the one you know but here's the thing you know what some of these kids a small number of

00:08:28.120 them when they do something like this it's kind of maybe it's a sign that there is some serious

00:08:35.720 aggression lurking within them so you need you really need to clamp it down so if you decide to use your

00:08:41.900 judgment and you missed some kid and the next thing you know he's pulling out an automatic weapon and

00:08:46.840 mowing people down you know that's a catastrophe so what do you decide to do we're never going to let

00:08:52.500 that happen again and you impose more rules to make sure you catch every potential um uh you know serial

00:09:00.480 killer um and you may catch every potential serial killer but not but 999 out of a thousand

00:09:06.980 kids who are doing these horrific drawings are never going to be serial killers yeah and i think

00:09:13.680 there's one case that you brought up i thought was sort of funny but also really sad is about the

00:09:18.180 dad who gave his kid uh mike's hard lemonade yeah at a ballpark uh do you tell that story well yeah i mean

00:09:27.720 i read this in uh actually in the in the new york times um this guy was a professor at the university

00:09:33.740 of michigan and he took his i think seven or eight year old boy to a detroit tiger baseball game and

00:09:38.640 the kid wanted lemonade so dad went up and got it and the only lemonade they had was mike's hard

00:09:43.720 lemonade and his father had no idea that what hard lemonade was so the kid is drinking it out of the

00:09:50.500 container and a security guard sees it and immediately calls the police and an ambulance they rush the kid

00:09:57.860 to the hospital he's fine uh they're all set to release the kid and to his dad and the police won't

00:10:05.680 let them and they put the kid in a foster home and they made the dad come before a magistrate because

00:10:12.620 this was an example of child abuse now or child neglect uh the judge when he made this decision said

00:10:19.740 i hate to do it but we have to follow procedure the cops when they brought him to the judge said we hate

00:10:25.280 to do it but we have to follow procedure finally they let the kid go home but only if the dad leaves

00:10:31.340 the house and checks into a hotel for two weeks you know protecting the child from his father we hate to

00:10:37.240 do it but we have to follow procedure it was ludicrous uh and everyone knew it was ludicrous even as they

00:10:43.540 were doing it i mean eventually you know two weeks of disruption of a family and everything ended up

00:10:49.440 okay but the process that got you there was just um was was a preposterous example of the over

00:10:57.580 application of rules yeah i mean it sounded like something from like a camu novel i mean it was

00:11:02.500 just like just bizarre everyone knew it was bizarre and the weird thing about it is that everyone

00:11:08.520 involved knew it was bizarre even as they kept on doing it wow okay they all knew that the rules did

00:11:15.580 not apply we're not meant to apply to a case like this but they they followed the rules they had

00:11:21.760 to do it you know when i talk about this um when i give talks about this topic i point out to people

00:11:27.220 it's easy to snicker but you know in philadelphia where i live once uh every couple of years there's

00:11:33.660 a story that appears in the newspaper about this kid who has been unbelievably neglected you know 14 years

00:11:39.900 old weighs 75 pounds and somehow the family was was on the radar of the social welfare uh organizations 0.86

00:11:49.100 and nonetheless these case officers had allowed this abuse to persist and you know so there's a lot of

00:11:57.180 hand-wringing and and uh commitment that we can never let this happen again so there are cases where

00:12:04.720 people in positions of authority have extremely bad judgment or indifference and because there

00:12:12.200 aren't strict rules for them to follow they don't do their jobs and bad things happen but the solution

00:12:17.460 to that is not more rules the solution to that is better people as case officers okay so the solution

00:12:24.700 to that yeah is developing uh what aristotle called phronesis right but it's translated as practical

00:12:31.420 wisdom right in a nutshell what is phronesis or practical wisdom well it's not so easy to say

00:12:37.280 what it is in a nutshell what he thought it was is the ability to do the right thing in the right way

00:12:42.980 at the right time for the right reason and the important point is that he was contrasting his

00:12:51.040 understanding of wisdom with his teacher plato's plato was interested in wisdom also but for plato it was

00:12:59.540 abstract so you know wise people had these great thoughts about um uh universal general generalities

00:13:08.620 of of the world and human beings and aristotle was much less interested in that than he was

00:13:15.200 in how we go about making our practical day-to-day decisions um and whereas plato was looking for

00:13:22.180 abstract universals aristotle was interested in the particularities so what some people say is uh he thought

00:13:28.780 there was priority to the particular every situation is different every person is different

00:13:34.940 people who have had experience dealing with certain kinds of situations learn how to read the situation

00:13:41.280 they're perceptive they can empathize with the people they're dealing with and they find the right

00:13:47.020 uh step to take the right solution to this particular problem without regard to what the universal

00:13:53.860 universal generalization is of which this is an instance so it was really rooted in the practical

00:14:00.280 aristotle was a careful observer of the trades people in ancient greece and marveled at their ability to find

00:14:08.400 practical solutions to particular problems uh and he thought the same sort of thing you know was needed

00:14:16.080 when you when the problems you faced involved human beings rather than um building materials say

00:14:22.680 so yeah i love that analogy that aristotle make that uh becoming a good person living a flourishing

00:14:28.280 life is you sort of have to become craftsman in a lot of ways but how does uh phronesis tie in with

00:14:34.380 his virtue ethics like how does aristotle's conception of ethics or virtue guide how you use practical

00:14:42.460 wisdom as a tool well that's a great question and uh ken sharp and i make make a point of suggesting

00:14:50.020 that he thought that that practical wisdom was in some ways the master virtue you're right

00:14:55.860 aristotle was a virtue theorist which meant that moral people are not people who follow moral rules

00:15:02.560 there are people who have virtues courage humility honesty and stuff like that and to be a virtuous

00:15:09.960 person is to have to be a moral person is to have these virtues but also famously aristotle thought

00:15:16.680 that courage is a virtue but you can have too much courage honesty is a virtue but you can have too

00:15:22.820 much honesty so the trick is to have the right amount of courage when somebody have has too much

00:15:29.020 courage we call it recklessness when somebody has too little courage we call it cowardice so you need

00:15:36.040 to find what aristotle called the mean which is just the right amount of courage what helps you do that

00:15:41.800 wisdom is what helps you find the mean in addition sometimes virtues conflict

00:15:47.720 um you know kindness is a virtue honesty is a virtue so what do you do when your friend um we actually

00:15:57.080 use this this particular example in a class that we teach your friend calls you to come over and and

00:16:02.580 take a look at her before she goes to this fancy wedding she's all dressed up and you go and she opens 1.00

00:16:08.360 the door and she does a little pirouette and says how do i look and you think not so good

00:16:13.900 and the question is what do you tell her and when we give this example to students their immediate

00:16:20.460 reaction is tell the truth friendship is based on honesty if you can't count on your friends to be

00:16:26.060 honest they're not your friends but the more we unpack it the more they come to see that maybe that's not

00:16:32.100 the right thing to do that telling the truth is right if you think your friend has a reasonable

00:16:36.820 alternative if you think your friend won't be shattered to discover that even though she thinks

00:16:42.660 she looks great other people don't she knows she'll never trust her own judgment again so sometimes

00:16:48.420 what you need to do is tell the noble lie and knowing when to tell the truth and when to tell a lie

00:16:55.200 requires that you know your friend and know your friend extremely well so so so wisdom is what

00:17:02.020 enables us to resolve conflicts between virtues uh and find the mean amount of any particular virtue so

00:17:10.600 we regard it as the as the master virtue so how do you go about uh developing that wisdom because

00:17:17.560 there's a lot going on yep when you're making that decision so you were calculating how your how your

00:17:23.180 friend would respond uh you know what is in this situation like how do you figure out or develop that

00:17:28.060 ability to know what the right thing to do is the right time for the right reason the right place

00:17:34.440 well that's another great question and and you know there's a sense in which this case could take you a day

00:17:42.560 to figure out what how to answer your friend you sit down you create a spreadsheet with all the factors

00:17:50.520 how much confidence does she have what's her wardrobe look like blah blah blah and she says how do i look

00:17:55.880 and you say well give me a day and i'll let you know obviously that that's not going to fly so you're

00:18:01.920 going to have to come up with an answer and you're going to have to come up with an answer quickly

00:18:05.380 and one of the one of the interesting developments in modern cognitive psychology

00:18:10.280 is the sort of model kind of computational models of mind where we build up with experience these networks

00:18:19.380 of associations that enable us to come to conclusions extremely quickly and intuitively although we don't

00:18:28.480 necessarily know how we reach them so what we suggest in the book is that the way you get to make these

00:18:35.700 judgments right is by having is by practice you're crappy at it at the beginning and you keep on having

00:18:43.080 these experiences you make a try you get it wrong you learn from your mistake your your um cognitive

00:18:50.000 machinery gets smarter and smarter and eventually you're making these rapid decisions that are most

00:18:56.340 of the time the right decision there's no substitute we think for experience um you can't you can't give a

00:19:04.240 course on how to be wise and expect that at the end of the course people will be wise you learn it by

00:19:10.000 doing it often you learn it by watching other experienced people do it and learning from them

00:19:16.120 uh but there's no substitute for actually making the decisions getting feedback and refining your

00:19:23.580 ability to read situations so i mean are there some big picture cognitive or emotional skills that

00:19:29.080 are involved in wisdom like being comfortable with ambiguity or nuance or i mean it's something you can

00:19:36.220 something you can do to put yourself in a position where you can develop that ability to

00:19:39.980 judge shades of gray it certainly helps to be uh tolerant of ambiguity if not comfortable

00:19:46.880 because if you're not tolerant of ambiguity you will think that either you'll either think there's

00:19:53.600 a rule for every situation or you'll think i need a rule for every situation because i can't bear the

00:20:00.320 uncertainty i you know i don't mind being wrong as long as i'm wrong because i follow the rule that

00:20:05.600 somebody else articulated then if i'm wrong it's his fault it's not my fault so there are people who

00:20:10.900 can't tolerate ambiguity they want there to be a right answer they want it to be clear and unambiguous

00:20:16.640 um and you know for all i can say for those people is kind of get a life that's not the way the world is

00:20:23.560 and i think people know this in their everyday interactions i don't i think there are very few

00:20:28.460 parents for example who think that the right way to raise their kids is by following a set of rules

00:20:34.560 they may start out thinking that you know they read all these books that tell them how to be a good

00:20:40.640 parent and they say well we're just going to let our kid cry herself to sleep at night because that's 0.88

00:20:45.380 what you're supposed to do and so on and so on and so on all these rules and their kids teach them

00:20:50.140 basically that rules won't do the job their kids teach them because they apply the rules and the rules

00:20:55.420 don't work uh and having figured out how to raise the first kid along comes the second and all of a

00:21:01.500 sudden a completely different person so all the things that work with the first kid don't work

00:21:05.520 with the second kid so you your kids force you to appreciate that the way you manage child rearing

00:21:11.940 is by really knowing your child appreciating that that person's individuality and crafting solutions

00:21:19.840 to problems that are appropriate to the situation and to the to the person and i think good teachers

00:21:25.500 know this about the kids in their classrooms you treat every kid the same you're going to be a terrible

00:21:30.180 teacher kids need different things and your job is to figure out what each kid needs and then find a way

00:21:36.280 to provide it insofar as that's possible um so i think experience teaches us the limits of rules

00:21:42.980 but at the same time when we're in sort of official situations we want to be able to fall back on rules

00:21:51.440 because it takes the pressure off us yeah that the comment about how every kid is different and good

00:21:56.540 teachers know this there's been a lot of uh commentary and comments from teachers lately about some of the

00:22:02.760 top-down standards that states are putting on teachers and it's sort of hamstringing teachers like they

00:22:09.580 want to be a good teacher but they can't because they get ready get their students ready for this test

00:22:14.380 no no it's exactly now there are two things going on there one of them is this focus on the test as the

00:22:19.940 measure of all things uh and you know there's enough there's been enough inks built on that i don't need

00:22:26.020 to belabor the point um but even aside from that um by giving teacher scripts to follow they are de-skilling

00:22:36.120 teaching and that's going to have two effects it's i it's going to prevent teachers from developing

00:22:42.940 wisdom because the way you get wisdom is by do varying what you do and learning from your mistakes

00:22:49.580 if all you're doing is following a script you're not going to be any better teacher after 30 years

00:22:54.700 as you were the day you started uh or it's going to drive wise teachers out of teaching

00:22:59.720 you know i came into teaching a full of ambition to stimulate and excite young minds and find a way

00:23:09.040 into the heart and mind of every single second grader they won't let me do that the hell i'll 0.70

00:23:15.180 find another occupation so and i think that's what school systems are doing they're driving

00:23:20.440 the best teachers out of teaching because the things that attracted them to teaching aren't available

00:23:26.220 speaking of children are there things i know a lot of our listeners are parents they're dads

00:23:31.500 um are there things that we can do to help our children develop phronesis well the main thing i

00:23:39.340 think is to let them there's a there's a wonderful book written by a psychologist named wendy mogul

00:23:47.120 called the blessings of a skinned knee and her point and this book was written 15 years ago even before

00:23:54.140 the word helicopter parent had come into existence uh her point was that parents are too preoccupied

00:24:01.620 with protecting their kids from every little mishap every skinned knee it could be psychological

00:24:10.060 skinned knee they don't want their kids to ever be disappointed to ever be unhappy to ever

00:24:13.940 hurt themselves so they hover and make sure that mistakes never happen and i think that you know that

00:24:22.220 the kids will be um will have fewer moments of unhappiness but they will be completely unprepared

00:24:28.420 for living in the world as independent adults and they'll never have the opportunity to develop

00:24:35.700 wisdom because they never get to try things and discover that some things don't work so you have

00:24:42.200 to be willing to let your kid fail um you know when you're training a medical resident you have to be

00:24:47.860 willing to let the resident make decisions and sometimes have those decisions be wrong it's just

00:24:53.760 that you know in life and death situations the doctor is hovering so that after the resident has

00:24:58.720 made the mistake the doctor corrects it before we have a dead patient so you know skin knees are a

00:25:04.720 blessing drowned drowned kids are not a blessing so you want parents to be around to make sure that 1.00

00:25:10.640 nothing terrible happens but not so around so that he so that nothing even mildly bad happens it's very

00:25:18.000 hard to convince parents that it's okay for the kids to experience a little bit of failure and

00:25:23.640 unhappiness um it also builds resilience in kids you know failure is inevitable and if you have no

00:25:31.860 experience failing at things being disappointed and then picking yourself up and trying again when it

00:25:38.020 finally comes say in college you just you just disintegrate and and we see that i think more and

00:25:44.900 more in our college population college students are much more fragile nowadays than they were when i

00:25:51.600 started teaching and i think part of the reason why is they've been so well protected before they get

00:25:58.920 to college that they don't know what it's like to fail all right so let your kids experience failure

00:26:03.920 because experience is the the master teacher experiences the master but you know experience

00:26:08.960 with control sure you you want the failures to be manageable failures not catastrophic the other

00:26:14.900 thing is is by modeling we learn a lot by watching other people so you know if you're a wise person or a wise

00:26:23.020 parent that helps you to cultivate a wise child let your kids in on the process let them see you don't do

00:26:31.020 it behind a screen don't do your decision making behind the screen um talk to them about the

00:26:38.240 process you went through and deciding how to handle the situation and that may help also but it's a bump

00:26:45.280 it's a it's a long bumpy road um and uh you just have to be willing to occasionally experience failure

00:26:51.320 yourself as a parent i would say yeah for sure don't beat yourself up um are there any i mean you mentioned

00:26:58.620 the uh sort of the we're giving judges more discretion now with the drug cases are there any other

00:27:05.920 examples where you're seeing practical wisdom making a comeback into institutions we saw examples that

00:27:16.240 were kind of outlier examples there's a program for training medical students that's affiliated with

00:27:22.120 harvard where instead of doing the usual third and fourth year rotations from one specialty to another

00:27:27.960 the third year the third year med students get a panel of patients and they see those patients all

00:27:33.440 year whatever the patient whatever problem the patients have they come in and students deal with

00:27:39.700 them with experienced physicians looking over their shoulders and so what that does is it it encourages

00:27:46.920 doctors in training to appreciate that they're not treating organ systems they're treating people

00:27:53.640 because they've seen this person again and again and they know this person doesn't have just the

00:27:59.400 problem that they're bringing in today but the problems that they brought in a week or a month ago and they know

00:28:04.880 something about the person's family situation and what kind of a recommendation is a feasible

00:28:09.560 recommendation for this patient to be able to follow uh the students love it they uh turn out turn into

00:28:17.300 spectacular doctors but this has not spread you know this is a this is a wonderful little anomaly

00:28:24.640 and it may be that it doesn't spread because it's too expensive or it's more expensive to do the educating

00:28:32.080 this way there are there are in law schools the part of law school that most law students like the best is

00:28:38.820 something called the legal clinic which is where you actually you know people from the community come in

00:28:45.400 with their problems problems with a landlord with an employer mundane problems or not so mundane

00:28:51.380 problems and you get training in the law by helping real people solve real problems students love it

00:28:58.880 faculty are sort of contemptuous of it it's not academic enough so the legal clinic is usually taught by

00:29:06.400 somebody who's not a regular member of the law school faculty you know some practicing lawyer who once a week

00:29:12.120 comes in and runs the clinic but what the students learn i think is that legal issues always have

00:29:19.560 context attached and that you can't be a good lawyer just by knowing the law you need to know the context

00:29:26.080 you need to know the principles and the way you do that is by dealing with real cases and not with

00:29:31.740 textbook cases so those are examples uh you know if the legal clinic became a central part of law school

00:29:38.380 instead of a peripheral one that would uh almost certainly create wiser lawyers interesting yeah i

00:29:45.480 went to law school and uh yeah we had a legal clinic and you're right it wasn't taught by a regular

00:29:50.420 faculty member it was just a person who came in once or twice it almost never is and the more prestigious

00:29:55.460 the law school the more likely it is that the legal clinic if they have it at all will be taught by an

00:30:01.020 outsider and there there is sort of a movement in law school and i don't know if it's going to take uh

00:30:06.100 it has any legs but basically your first year of law school you first two years maybe you learn

00:30:11.960 all the basics like torch law contracts all the basics and then after that you sort of take these

00:30:16.780 semester-long classes that are more like seminars yeah um there's a movement saying that okay instead

00:30:22.680 of spending those two years doing these seminar classes just get the kids out there the students

00:30:26.720 out there actually practicing law under the guidance of a teacher but i don't know if it's going to go

00:30:33.000 anywhere well it's interesting because you know the law legal education is really on in crisis right

00:30:38.300 now because their job opportunities for lawyers are so bad and you have all these people getting

00:30:43.720 out of law school with massive debt so there's talk about can we do it in two years rather than three

00:30:48.900 uh so so students are not in as big a hole when they finish and stuff like that and there are many

00:30:55.460 fewer applicants so there are you know second tier law schools are not always able to fill up their

00:31:00.860 classes it's a major problem and one possible approach so this may be an opportunity it may be

00:31:07.300 an opportunity and uh you know produced by economic exigencies to get law schools to rethink how they do

00:31:16.480 their educating and it may turn out as you say that what ends up happening is one grueling year in the

00:31:24.440 classroom and then the next couple of years are basically spent as an intern at the feet of a

00:31:30.660 an experienced practitioner be less expensive to do and more satisfying to the students and my guess is

00:31:38.480 it'll produce much better lawyers well that's funny that's how they used to do legal education

00:31:43.300 like in the 19th century like you read the law like abraham lincoln did and then you wouldn't you

00:31:49.000 found an attorney to be your mentor yeah i think there's a few states like vermont still has that

00:31:55.000 program so you don't actually have to go to law school in vermont uh you can intern at a law firm

00:32:00.280 for three or four years and uh you have a law degree you take the bar exam yeah yeah i think this

00:32:05.920 i don't know this for a fact but it wouldn't surprise me if the for increasing formalization of legal

00:32:12.520 education is uh an attempt to attain higher status you know you go to medical school for four years

00:32:20.300 the idea is you can become a lawyer after one year what does that say about the relative status of

00:32:25.900 training in law versus training in medicine so you beef it up to make it feel like there's this magic

00:32:31.780 secret stuff that people learn when they go to law school and it takes them three grueling years to

00:32:37.640 learn it um most of the law people i know who've gone to law school basically say they the only year

00:32:44.440 that's really essential for their training is the first and after that they just take classes they're

00:32:49.900 interested in and it's fine you know they're happy they enjoy it and blah blah blah but you know

00:32:55.380 after the first year all of it's gravy yeah that was my experience too well uh barry schwartz this

00:33:02.240 has been a fascinating discussion uh thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure

00:33:06.360 thank you so much you asked wonderful questions for us thank you bye-bye bye-bye our guest today

00:33:12.520 was barry shorts he's the author of the book practical wisdom and you can find that on amazon.com

00:33:17.080 well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice

00:33:24.700 make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if you enjoy

00:33:28.360 the podcast i'd really appreciate it if you give us a review on itunes or stitcher really help get the

00:33:32.680 word out about the show and also give us some feedback on how we can improve it

00:33:35.580 really appreciate it and until next time this is brett mckay telling you to stay manly

00:33:41.740 you

The Art of Manliness - September 15, 2015

#138： Reviving Practical Wisdom with Barry Schwartz

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