The Lesson from Private Ski Lesson, or How Money Cannot Buy Performance

Private skiing lessons are silly for beginners, because their most important problems are pretty similar within the same rough age group (small children vs older children vs adult beginners), and there’s a lot of learning by watching other beginners learning to solve your similar problems. Even once I was a solid intermediate, group lessons with others who could get down the blues were still useful.

An hour one-on-one started becoming effective once I was confidently skiing all the groomers, getting through moguls, and needed feedback on my quirks.

Nothing to do with skiing, but the economics of private tuition are fascinating.

Consider: if you are willing to pay $100/hr for a tutor/instructor (in whatever), then perhaps you'd pay $200/hr for an instructor who is twice as effective (i.e. who can achieve the same results in half the time). Or would you?

What if you value your time at $100/hr. The opportunity cost of 2 hours' tuition with the $100/hr instructor is $400. But he opportunity cost of the same 'amount' of tuition with the $200/hr instructor is $300 (since you pay $200 regardless, but you save an hour of your own time, valued at $100).

So the instructor who is only twice as good can actually charge $299 an hour, or nearly triple as much, and the student will still be better off relative to the less effective instructor.

These figures are arbitrary, but the fact that the student/client's time has significant value is often omitted from the calculus.

It's food for thought for anyone who instructs, advises, consults, or teaches.

They took one ski lesson and thought they would be good at skiing? Sustained training from a professional will definitely create a better outcome than not. The author obviously is trying to extrapolate on this point to make a larger point about markets, but the base argument doesn't really ring true.

Medici famously used Galileo Galilei to teach their children.

And countless other powerful men made sure their kins are taught by the brightest minds.

I think at the very top this works out.

OP may be right in his conclusions but they apply to upper middle class, not to the richest and the most powerful.