“Both inside the humanities and outside, people feel that the intellectual firepower in the universities is in the sciences, that the important issues that people of all sorts care about, like inequality and climate change, are being addressed not in the English departments,” said Andrew Delbanco, a Columbia University professor who writes about higher education.
That’s the NYT on the decline of humanities majors.
Many years ago my industry, insurance, probably employed lots of non-technical people in analytical and sales roles. The skills required were more generalist because the business was more personal.
But that’s all changing. Insurance has gotten miles more scientific in the last 20 years and that has driven all the trends that we spend our time talking (complaining) about: the rise of actuaries, industry consolidation, margin squeezing, etc.
Veterans spend a fair bit of time missing the old days and in this case it’s true: they were very different. But as our tools for measuring all sorts of things have improved, the social purpose of our industry (risk management) is being being better achieved.
Not Unreasonable 