Once again on academia. I am not a big fun of presenting everything in terms of some sort of a class struggle, and of reducing human problems to economic issues, but this piece is hugely interesting. No, I do not think professors are like drug lords and I do not envy their salaries that much. The economic ones are not the main problems there are, it is more to do, I think, with what we think science is and how it should be related to other human activities. But perhaps the whole system does resemble, from an economic point of view, a drug gang to some extent (but let us be humorous rather than too serious about this metaphor). The PhDs usually do not live with their mums, after all. Some excerpts: The title of the chapter, “Why drug dealers still live with their moms”, was based on the finding that the income distribution within gangs was extremely skewed in favor of those at the top, while the rank-and-file street sellers earned even less than employees in legitimate low-skilled activities, let’s say at McDonald’s. They calculated $3.30 as the hourly rate, that is, well below a living wage (that’s why they still live with their moms). With a constant supply of new low-level drug sellers entering the market and ready to be exploited, drug lords can become increasingly rich without redistributing their wealth towards the bottom. There is an expanding mass of rank-and-file “outsiders” ready to forgo income for future wealth, and a small core of “insiders” securing incomes largely at the expense of the mass. Even if the probability that you might get shot in academia is relatively small (unless you mark student papers very harshly), one can observe similar dynamics. Academic systems more or less everywhere rely at least to some extent on the existence of a supply of “outsiders” ready to forgo wages and employment security in exchange for the prospect of uncertain security, prestige, freedom and reasonably high salaries that tenured positions entail. Because of the increasing inflow of potential outsiders ready to accept this kind of working conditions, this allows insiders to outsource a number of their tasks onto them, especially teaching, in a context where there are increasing pressures for research and publishing.
Posted on: Sun, 12 Oct 2014 10:50:42 +0000
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