Exploring Professional Licensure in Skilled Trades

Should lawyers, home alarm fitters, hairdressers and plumbers all have to get a license to do their business? And what about dog walkers and surgeons? It’s an absurd question, of course, but as Rebecca Haw Allensworth reveals in her new book, The Licensing Racket, we live in absurdly credentialed times. As Allensworth notes, at a moment in history when AI is about to replace many professional workers with bots, there really are required licenses for “trades” like home alarm fitters. And what about podcasters? Should amateurs like myself have to get a professional license to broadcast conversations with experts like Rebecca Haw Allensworth?

Here are the 5 KEEN-ON takeaways from our conversation with Allensworth:

* Licensing as exclusion rather than protection: Allensworth argues that many professional licensing requirements serve more to restrict entry to professions and maintain high prices than to actually protect the public.

* Self-regulation creates conflicts of interest: Licensing boards are typically composed of professionals from the industry they regulate, creating inherent conflicts where they prioritize their profession's interests over public protection.

* Appropriate vs. excessive licensing: While Allensworth supports licensing for complex and dangerous professions (doctors, lawyers, pilots), she criticizes excessive requirements for jobs like hairstyling, which requires as many educational hours as law school.

* Regulatory failure in healthcare: The licensing system contributes to America's healthcare problems by increasing costs and creating scarcity, while simultaneously failing to effectively discipline dangerous practitioners (as seen in the opioid crisis).

* Alternative approaches to professionalism: Professionalism doesn't necessarily require "closure" (restricting who can enter). Certification systems that signal quality without prohibiting practice may be more effective than licensing for many occupations.

Rebecca Haw Allensworth is a Associate Dean for Research and holds the David Daniels Allen Distinguished Chair of Law at Vanderbilt Law School. She studies antitrust and professional licensing. Her work on antitrust focuses on how to adapt competition policy to address competition problems posed by tech platforms and her research on professional licensing explores how lawmakers should balance the need for expertise in regulating the professions with the problems that can arise from self-regulation. She is the author of The Licensing Racket: How We Decide Who Is Allowed to Work and Why It Goes Wrong? (Harvard University Press, February 2025), a deep dive into the pathologies of professional licensing in America. Her article about medical licensing boards and unethical prescribers, “Licensed to Pill,” appeared in The New York Review of Books in July 2020. Her work has been cited by the U.S. Supreme Court and has received the thirteenth annual Jerry S. Cohen Memorial Fund Writing Award for groundbreaking antitrust scholarship.

Named as one of the "100 most connected men" by GQ magazine, Andrew Keen is amongst the world's best known broadcasters and commentators. In addition to presenting the daily KEEN ON show, he is the host of the long-running How To Fix Democracy interview series. He is also the author of four prescient books about digital technology: CULT OF THE AMATEUR, DIGITAL VERTIGO, THE INTERNET IS NOT THE ANSWER and HOW TO FIX THE FUTURE. Andrew lives in San Francisco, is married to Cassandra Knight, Google's VP of Litigation & Discovery, and has two grown children.

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