Re: Family Businesses and Licensing
On Thu, 10 Jul 2003, John Perich wrote: In my informal experience, fathers and sons tend to work together full-time only in professions with strict licensing or training requirements. Electricians, lawyers, realtors and even CPAs - I've There are zero licensing requirements for farming. I'd lay even money that farming would be in the top 5 professions on a proportion of father-son teams scale. Eric
Re: Family Businesses and Licensing
In my informal experience, fathers and sons tend to work together full-time only in professions with strict licensing or training requirements. Electricians, lawyers, realtors and even CPAs - I've found more father/son teams here than in any other type of job. All of those jobs have fairly rigid prerequisites (electricians have to pass journeyman and master-level tests; lawyers have the bar and law school, etc). Why is that? As Eric pointed out, farming is also a profession where fathers and sons usually work together: in addition to what was named: Carpenting, construction, medicine, mechanics, etc. This is a social phenomenom much older than government licensing; it spans eras and cultures. I'd say rather than licensing requirements, fathers and sons often work together in vocations with specialized training requirements. Sons often learn this trade from their fathers and grow up in an environment where respect for this trade is fostered and encouraged. Often in these professions, people must work together in teams and use very specialized knowledge to be successful. A family bond is a good way to reduce search costs for good employees. Vocational training is combined with father-son bonding for further reduction in the cost of training. In other types of jobs that require less specialized training, the benefits of working with/for your father are typically much smaller. Also - why is it more often father/son, and not mother/daughter or mother/son? Or father/daughter? In general, women do not go in to these types of professions. Sons tend not to follow in the footsteps of their mothers for obvious reasons. Mother-daughter professional relationships are less common because there are far fewer female professionals in these fields - but consider mother/daughter relationships in housewifery, modeling, beauty pageantry, etc. - Zac Gochenour [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Family Businesses and Licensing
On 2003-07-10, John Perich uttered to [EMAIL PROTECTED]: In my informal experience, fathers and sons tend to work together full-time only in professions with strict licensing or training requirements. That's an interesting one. My first stab is that we might go about it the other way. Why do such professions need strict licencing? One explanation would be that these professions are crafts where the best way to learn the job is to do it. In such professions we wouldn't expect there to be strict outcome based criteria on what one needs to know, but we do know that a certain learning process is more successful than others. So, if we want to assure safety and efficiency, we can't just test for an applicant's skills -- there'd be a problem with information. Thus the market orients itself along the learning process, the uncertainty about the outcomes makes the professions more amenable to legislative intervention, and the eventual legislation then follows the process oriented reasoning. Also - why is it more often father/son, and not mother/daughter or mother/son? Or father/daughter? Perhaps self-selection in occupations, so that parent/child combinations with different sexes do not benefit from intergenerational knowledge transfer? That leaves the mother/daughter pairing. Perhaps that's because of self-selection into lines of work which are less crafty? -- Sampo Syreeni, aka decoy - mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED], tel:+358-50-5756111 student/math+cs/helsinki university, http://www.iki.fi/~decoy/front openpgp: 050985C2/025E D175 ABE5 027C 9494 EEB0 E090 8BA9 0509 85C2
Re: Family Businesses and Licensing
Another interesting question might be how does the distribution of income of children of people in these professions vary conditional on whether they go into their parents line of work controlling for socioeconomic status, etc. I would gamble there are a disproportionate number of people centered around their parents profession's wage, with most coming from the lower end of the income spectrum -- in other words I am speculating that most of the additional wage from these professions comes from rote training and experience rather than other factors, although it seems also that the professions you mention all seem to also be of the very small business type, so the parents business might be an endowment much of which is only capturable if a child operates it, and as I believe small business operators are largely male (for whatever reasons, cultural or otherwise), that might explain some of the gender business, no pun intended. At 08:56 PM 7/10/2003 -0700, you wrote: In my informal experience, fathers and sons tend to work together full-time only in professions with strict licensing or training requirements. Electricians, lawyers, realtors and even CPAs - I've found more father/son teams here than in any other type of job. All of those jobs have fairly rigid prerequisites (electricians have to pass journeyman and master-level tests; lawyers have the bar and law school, etc). Why is that? Also - why is it more often father/son, and not mother/daughter or mother/son? Or father/daughter? -JP Do you Yahoo!? http://us.rd.yahoo.com/search/mailsig/*http://search.yahoo.comThe New Yahoo! Search - Faster. Easier. Bingo.
Re: Competition vs. Profits in the NBA
The business model I floated a year or so ago (sadly on April Fool's Day) gives visiting teams a % of local revenue, based on attendance. (See http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-lewis040102.asp) That'd probably create a happy-medium between the two forces. But more to your point, I'm starting to believe that the idea of a big market team in sports is something of a fiction. Instead, big market is synonymous with historically and currently good team who doesn't go into debt. The last part creates some honestly _small_ market teams -- see anything team a dairy state -- but note how few true big-market teams there are, and what sets them apart: 1) The Lakers are clearly a big market team. The Clippers, who share a home-court with them, aren't. 2) The Philadelphia Eagles (NFL) were a regularly competitive team before the salary cap. The 76ers (NBA) and Phillies (MLB) were both considered failing, small market teams until recently. 3) The Nets play in the same complex as the Giants and Jets (NFL). 4) The Portland Trailblazers are considered a regular contender in the NBA. Portland is so small it has no football or baseball team, although it may have the latter in the future. 5) The Dolphins are a football institution. The Heat have been mostly competitive throughout their history. The Florida Marlins are the prototypical poor team. 6) No one would have a problem with a White Sox/Cubs world series, even though they're both clearly large market teams. 7) Detroit made the NBA finals three years in a row, pre-cap and pre- Jordan era (1988-1990), winning two. The Lions (NFL) and Tigers (MLB) are perhaps two of the worst teams in recent sports history. (The Pistons of the NBA, on the other hand, have been doing well over the last few years). The idea that large markets exist seem more to be a function of the team than the city itself. So, if you have a dynasty, it'll draw eyeballs, _even if it's in the bumbles._ The best example is the Detroit run in the NBA. In their third year, they played Portland, with, if I recall correctly, better ratings than they had the two years before (versus the Lakers). But more importantly, remember that these finals were projected (after game 2) to have the worst ratings since 1982. (As it turned out, they had the worst ratings since they've been recorded.) Who played in the '82 Finals? The Lakers beat the Sixers, 4-2. Note that the two teams had faced each other in 1980 with the same result (although LA had a different coach) and would face each other _again_ in 1983. In '83, the Sixers won 4-0, and the ratings were better. The best explanation is that fan base has a significant lag time to it, especially as you get to smaller markets. Combine that with the fact that the one team that had been to the finals the year before (NJ) was a huge underdog and didn't put up much of a fight, and this series was doomed to lose to Joe Millionaire. So, the problem isn't that we want to give small market teams a chance. The problem is that leagues dislike dynasties, but dynasties are good for them. Dan Lewis At 01:31 PM 7/10/2003 -0500, you wrote: Playoffs between small market teams get low ratings, like the New Jersey Nets/San Antonio Spurs championship game. But a lot people inside sports seem to resent big market teams (Yankees, LA Lakers) consistently dominating the play-offs, although audiences seem to want dynasties from big cities. Is there an inherent problem here? Is it inevitable that there is a conflict between people inside sports who want to see some diversity among the winners? Is big league team sports inherently biased towards the dynasty model? Are there viable business models for team sports that could produce a wider range of winners? Fabio
