Michael Spence

Economist whose 1973 "Job Market Signaling" model established that a signal (a diploma, a customized job application, polished prose) is informative to an employer only insofar as it is costly to produce or fake — cheap-to-fake signals collapse toward noise. The vault first meets him not through his own paper but through Galdin and Silbert's 2025 structural model, which invokes Spence explicitly to explain why LLM-generated writing destroys writing's value as a hiring signal. Spence's logic is the labor-market twin of Nick Szabo's account of monetary value: both rest scarcity's meaning entirely on the cost of faking it, one for money, one for hiring.

References

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