Of the three countries with widespread apprenticeship programs-Denmark, Germany, Switzerland-early specialization only resulted in a lifetime earnings advantage in Switzerland, which has had easily the slowest growing economy of those three nations in recent decades.

In 2017, President Trump issued an executive order to expand apprenticeship programs to prepare workers for “today’s rapidly changing economy.” The economists, on the other hand, concluded that the more rapidly a nation’s economy is changing, the greater the long-term advantage of general education. politicians on both sides of the aisle have advocated for a move toward the German apprenticeship model. The pattern was particularly pronounced in two countries with famously extensive apprenticeship programs, Denmark and Germany, an important finding given that, over the past decade, U.S. Workers who received general education, the economists concluded, were better positioned to adapt to change in a wicked world, where work next year might not look like work last year. The early specializers often won in the short-term, and lost in the long run. The research pertains to every stage of life, from the development of children in math, music, and sports, to students fresh out of college trying to find their way, to midcareer professionals in need of a change and would-be retirees looking for a new vocation after leaving a previous one. But the research shows that those stories are in fact the rare exception en route to success, and typically confined to repetitive domains, in which work next year will look just like work last year-what psychologist Robin Hogarth termed “kind learning environments.” Most of us are not working in kind learning environments it was eye-opening to learn about the advantages of breadth and delayed specialization. We’ve come to believe that people who specialize early and narrowly-like Tiger Woods, who was already on national television golfing at age 2-have an insurmountable advantage.

My book, Range, which came out in 2019, is a journey through that research, and it shows that most of us would be better off with the long version of that quote. In the nearly 430 years since that barb aimed at The Bard, researchers have compiled a mountain of work examining whether the Jack of all trades is, indeed, ever better than a master of one. Our notions of the relative merits of breadth versus specialization are often based on little more than adages like those above, but they needn’t be.

The range david epstein