Cornell men's assistant basketball coaches named

[cornellbigred.com];

What is up with all the assistant head coach crap?? oh, that's right cornell pays staff shit and give titles instead.

shasta1
What is up with all the assistant head coach crap?? oh, that's right cornell pays staff shit and give titles instead.

I think it's much like ranks for professors. Assistant < Associate < Head

Swampy

shasta1
What is up with all the assistant head coach crap?? oh, that's right cornell pays staff shit and give titles instead.

I think it's much like ranks for professors. Assistant < Associate < Head

Plus lecturers / courtesy lecturers. That may mean "good prof despite no Ph.D"

shasta1
What is up with all the assistant head coach crap?? oh, that's right cornell pays staff shit and give titles instead.

All the schools do that in all sports...it's really nothing new.

billhoward

Swampy

shasta1
What is up with all the assistant head coach crap?? oh, that's right cornell pays staff shit and give titles instead.

I think it's much like ranks for professors. Assistant < Associate < Head

Plus lecturers / courtesy lecturers. That may mean "good prof despite no Ph.D"

Plenty of lecturers, etc. have PhD's. They just can't find permanent jobs as schools have cut back on permanent positions.

For example, I've seen estimates that more than half of all classes in the California state university system are taught by lecturers. I also have several friends living in regions like the San Francisco Bay Area, where there is a large, regularly replenished pool of under-employed academic laborers. Many of these friends are now old enough for mandatory Medicare and spent most of their careers working as lecturers. They continued working well into their 70's, both because they liked their work and because their lifetime earnings were too little for a comfortable retirement. While working, they often needing to hold (and commute to) 2-3 jobs at a time just to make ends meet. (The commuting is a killer. You may live in Oakland, but if you're teaching at Davis and San Jose, going to your next class is not exactly the same as walking across campus.)

To expand on your point about being a "good prof," lecturers are not tenure-track and are employed at will, with contracts renewed semester-to-semester. So they aren't rehired if they're not good teachers. (Which usually comes down to how students grade them on teaching evaluations, something that often has nothing to do with how well the teacher actually teaches or how much the students actually learn -- but this is a different conversation.) In addition, lecturers may also be excellent researchers. One of my friends, a Cornellian BTW, just won an award for a book published last year. Yet despite having been steadily having her teaching contracts renewed steadily and being a productive scholar, she never landed a tenure-track job.

I suspect work life is better for assistant coaches.

Swampy

billhoward

Swampy

shasta1
What is up with all the assistant head coach crap?? oh, that's right cornell pays staff shit and give titles instead.

I think it's much like ranks for professors. Assistant < Associate < Head

Plus lecturers / courtesy lecturers. That may mean "good prof despite no Ph.D"

Plenty of lecturers, etc. have PhD's. They just can't find permanent jobs as schools have cut back on permanent positions.

For example, I've seen estimates that more than half of all classes in the California state university system are taught by lecturers. I also have several friends living in regions like the San Francisco Bay Area, where there is a large, regularly replenished pool of under-employed academic laborers. Many of these friends are now old enough for mandatory Medicare and spent most of their careers working as lecturers. They continued working well into their 70's, both because they liked their work and because their lifetime earnings were too little for a comfortable retirement. While working, they often needing to hold (and commute to) 2-3 jobs at a time just to make ends meet. (The commuting is a killer. You may live in Oakland, but if you're teaching at Davis and San Jose, going to your next class is not exactly the same as walking across campus.)

To expand on your point about being a "good prof," lecturers are not tenure-track and are employed at will, with contracts renewed semester-to-semester. So they aren't rehired if they're not good teachers. (Which usually comes down to how students grade them on teaching evaluations, something that often has nothing to do with how well the teacher actually teaches or how much the students actually learn -- but this is a different conversation.) In addition, lecturers may also be excellent researchers. One of my friends, a Cornellian BTW, just won an award for a book published last year. Yet despite having been steadily having her teaching contracts renewed steadily and being a productive scholar, she never landed a tenure-track job.

I suspect work life is better for assistant coaches.

Assistant coaches hopefully don't have to worry about this.

marty
Assistant coaches hopefully don't have to worry about this.

A rather foreseeable consequence of government mandates.

KeithK

marty
Assistant coaches hopefully don't have to worry about this.

A rather foreseeable consequence of government mandates.

It would be nice, Keith, if you would keep your right-wing politics off eLynah. It adds nothing.

This is not a political issue. The cut in non-tenure track (generally adjunct) faculty is directly related to federal government mandates, primarily the health insurance law. Whether you call it Obamacare or ACA, it has been named by the schools as the reason they cut the ranks and/or hours of non-tenure track instructors. This isn't politics. It is fact, no matter which party or politician you support.

Cornell is one of the better schools when it comes to the percentage of instructors who are tenure track. It is estimated that over 76% of faculty at Cornell is tenure track. This is likely mostly due to Ithaca's remote geographic location, away from a large enough supply of highly trained PhD experts. However, that still leaves almost 24% of the instructors a non-tenure track. That includes visiting professors on one year gigs that generally pay very little with almost no chance of long-term employment. It is not easy to move to Ithaca for a low-paying one year job. It also includes adjuncts, only a small portion of whom are brought in from industry/practice, and most of whom are PhDs with excellent qualifications who work for just a couple thousand dollars per course per semester.

I am not an academic, but there is no profession that has felt the negatives of economic upheaval in the last 10 years like young academics. We still value higher education and throw money at it, largely because of the unlimited student loan system (which is also due to government statute that practically prohibits default on student loans). Schools build more and hire more and more administrators for higher and higher salaries. Yet schools find new ways to hire fewer faculty and pay less.

I love Cornell and root for its teams, but Cornell is quite guilty of this too. When I get a call from some Cornell student asking for money, I tell them no. Even with our poor investing performance recently, Cornell's endowment is about $2 billion, right? Cornell builds and builds. Cornell hires more and more administrators. Cornell raises tuition, now to $50,000/year before room and board. Yet the one thing they do not value is teaching and who teaches the students.

One more thing. While I agree with Swampy mostly, I have seen significant evidence that neither teaching evaluations nor teaching observations are valued at all at major universities. They generally don't care about teaching ability at all. For tenure track faculty, departments care about research and (for sciences) grant receipts. For non-tenure track, departments generally care that they can argue that the hire has the expertise to teach the class(es) and can teach in the right schedule. Teaching ability is almost never considered at real universities.

2
One more thing. While I agree with Swampy mostly, I have seen significant evidence that neither teaching evaluations nor teaching observations are valued at all at major universities. They generally don't care about teaching ability at all. For tenure track faculty, departments care about research and (for sciences) grant receipts. For non-tenure track, departments generally care that they can argue that the hire has the expertise to teach the class(es) and can teach in the right schedule. Teaching ability is almost never considered at real universities.

But not every institution is a "major university." Many doctoral graduates of major universities go on to teach at "minor universities" in non-tenure track positions, never mind the doctoral graduates of minor universities who are virtually destined for that track. These minor universities care not at all, generally, about research dollars or expertise. They want satisfied "customers" who will keep coming back and filling their coffers with tuition dollars. Something for all the (lazy) deans and deanlets to use in order to justify themselves, teaching evaluations are the chief metric this class of institution uses to make sure their customers are satisfied. Who gets the best evaluations? Generally, instructors who are entertainers rather than educators, who happen to teach courses with light, non-challenging material, and who bribe their students, whether with inflated grades or donuts.

Eventually these practices will "trickle up" to even the elite universities, if they haven't already. Then all the deans and deanlets will have another weapon to wield against higher faculty salaries and faculty self-governance. Meanwhile, educational standards will sink beneath the waves.

You are quite right that young academics have been hit extremely hard in the last ten years, but it's really just a version of what's been going on the rest of society. Even in the STEM professions, I'm sure the wages of average workers have not kept pace in any way with the gains of the 1%. And yet no one seeks to unionize; indeed, unions have become more and more demonized at the second they might be the most useful, particularly to the so-called "white collar professions." (Professions? Not really anymore. We're all just labor units. Why do you think they want to get rid of tenure for educators?)

It's quickly becoming a question of "us vs. them," and "us" keeps growing, even though many of "us" aren't quite perceiving it. One of the great ways for "them" to keep "us" down? Keep 'em poor, uneducated, arguing with each other, and chasing after a golden reward that's ever further out of reach. As far as "they" are concerned, we can continue to congratulate ourselves on social progress 'til the cows come home, whether it's underwhelming health care reform or the still all-too-slow recognition of basic human dignities for all citizens. Meanwhile, they're winning the bigger battle: eviscerating education, particularly public education, under the guise of "reform" in order to plop us right back in the 19th century—now with system of societal hierarchies based on caste rather than on race.

Scersk '97

2
One more thing. While I agree with Swampy mostly, I have seen significant evidence that neither teaching evaluations nor teaching observations are valued at all at major universities. They generally don't care about teaching ability at all. For tenure track faculty, departments care about research and (for sciences) grant receipts. For non-tenure track, departments generally care that they can argue that the hire has the expertise to teach the class(es) and can teach in the right schedule. Teaching ability is almost never considered at real universities.

But not every institution is a "major university." Many doctoral graduates of major universities go on to teach at "minor universities" in non-tenure track positions, never mind the doctoral graduates of minor universities who are virtually destined for that track. These minor universities care not at all, generally, about research dollars or expertise. They want satisfied "customers" who will keep coming back and filling their coffers with tuition dollars. Something for all the (lazy) deans and deanlets to use in order to justify themselves, teaching evaluations are the chief metric this class of institution uses to make sure their customers are satisfied. Who gets the best evaluations? Generally, instructors who are entertainers rather than educators, who happen to teach courses with light, non-challenging material, and who bribe their students, whether with inflated grades or donuts.

Eventually these practices will "trickle up" to even the elite universities, if they haven't already. Then all the deans and deanlets will have another weapon to wield against higher faculty salaries and faculty self-governance. Meanwhile, educational standards will sink beneath the waves.

You are quite right that young academics have been hit extremely hard in the last ten years, but it's really just a version of what's been going on the rest of society. Even in the STEM professions, I'm sure the wages of average workers have not kept pace in any way with the gains of the 1%. And yet no one seeks to unionize; indeed, unions have become more and more demonized at the second they might be the most useful, particularly to the so-called "white collar professions." (Professions? Not really anymore. We're all just labor units. Why do you think they want to get rid of tenure for educators?)

It's quickly becoming a question of "us vs. them," and "us" keeps growing, even though many of "us" aren't quite perceiving it. One of the great ways for "them" to keep "us" down? Keep 'em poor, uneducated, arguing with each other, and chasing after a golden reward that's ever further out of reach. As far as "they" are concerned, we can continue to congratulate ourselves on social progress 'til the cows come home, whether it's underwhelming health care reform or the still all-too-slow recognition of basic human dignities for all citizens. Meanwhile, they're winning the bigger battle: eviscerating education, particularly public education, under the guise of "reform" in order to plop us right back in the 19th century—now with system of societal hierarchies based on caste rather than on race.

Thread drift be damned. It's intelligent discussions like this that keep me coming to ELF in the off season.

Sorry if I used imprecise terms, Scersk, but what I should have written is that almost no schools outside of the community college and junior college systems care about teaching. I have multiple examples of early career academics at different types of institutions who ask the department for copies of their own course evaluations months later, only to find the original envelopes are still sealed because no one in the department ever looked at the reviews. And yet the department decided to bring back/not bring back those academics without ever considering the evaluations. Similarly, when a department does decide to send in a more senior faculty member to observe a lecture, it generally comes at the end of the year after future hiring decisions have been made for non-tenure track, and the observer is generally an academic with no training in education.

Schools don't care about instruction quality. They just don't, because it does not matter to their business model. Good teaching does not increase donations or grants. Good teaching does not increase application numbers or quality of applicants. Good teaching does not really increase prestige in US News or Times Higher Ed rankings. When parents or students pay tuition, they are not paying for instruction. Tuition is paid for the credential that comes at the end and all related career advancement opportunities. Very few people--parents and students included--care about instruction quality in the end.

As for the economic reality of academics being similar to other professions: this is untrue. Very few professions work this way. Academics go to school after college for about 4-7 years and then often have postdocs, fellowships, etc. The universities try to increase the number of grad students, because that provides them with cheap labor for teaching and research, but they don't care that these grad students can't get jobs when they graduate.

Unlike doctors, lawyers, nurses, academics do not have their value increased by government regulations requiring that all instructors meet certain standards of competency. Therefore, sometimes unqualified or immoral people take jobs from the well-trained. (I could name names of famous "professors" who are former terrorists, famous criminals, or just people who once wrote a book but lack real expertise, but if I did so I'd risk insulting political sensibilities on both sides).

Tenure has also done great harm to the younger generation of academics. Many older academics see no reason to retire, because they make the top salary they can, they teach jsut a few classes they have taught for many years, and they often work with the assistance of TAs. Many older tenured professors, especially at the mid-range schools, are actually surpassed in accomplishment by the much younger non-tenure track academics at the same schools. The older professors just benefited from better much job markets in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Eventually these older professors will die, but it will be too late for the current younger generation. Moreover, the movement away from tenure and even toward more adjuncts, means many fewer overall opportunities for new academics despite the fact that more undergrads are in college than ever before.

The craziest part is the lack of value the schools put on the new instructors. Here's a true story about an SEC flagship state school humanities department from just a couple years ago. Someone I know well was hired right out of a PhD program to be a visiting assistant professor for one year. She was tasked with creating and teaching 2 brand new courses per semester and expected to do research and publish though she had no research/travel stipend. She was paid $40,000 and expected to move 1,000 miles with her family, but the school did not pay her moving expenses. She was willing and eager to take the position as a step in her career. She knew what she was getting into, and it was her choice to enter into this relationship. She did not blame them. But then she got to the department of about 2 dozen faculty members and found out that there was an administrative office with 5 administrative all making more money than she did. One administrator had only two jobs: she scanned documents and xeroxed documents for the department. Even the photocopy lady made more money than the young academic who had spent 6 years in graduate school, was one of only a handful of experts in the world in her very relevant field, and who was being tasked with teaching some of the more well-attend classes in the department. Teaching is supposed to be the main role of a university, but teaching is not valued. Making photocopies is more valued.

Let me just add to me very long post above that I agree, Scersk, that a lot of STEM professionals are getting a bad deal these days. We have laws about H1B visas. If these laws are not being broken, they are being bent. Salaries for engineers must increase more. Also, older engineers who get laid off have a very hard time finding new employers who sufficiently value their experiences.

Nevertheless, the situation in even the most distressed STEM fields is better than that for the vast majority of young academics.

The Cornell endowment is about $6 billion.

2
Sorry if I used imprecise terms, Scersk, but what I should have written is that almost no schools outside of the community college and junior college systems care about teaching. I have multiple examples of early career academics at different types of institutions who ask the department for copies of their own course evaluations months later, only to find the original envelopes are still sealed because no one in the department ever looked at the reviews. And yet the department decided to bring back/not bring back those academics without ever considering the evaluations. Similarly, when a department does decide to send in a more senior faculty member to observe a lecture, it generally comes at the end of the year after future hiring decisions have been made for non-tenure track, and the observer is generally an academic with no training in education.

While I don't doubt much of what you've said above, I still have to take issue with your first sentence. Let's just say, without naming names, that I'm pretty familiar with a "university"—neither a community college nor a junior college—that takes teaching evaluations quite seriously, particularly for courses with multiple sections taught by different instructors. Around campus, it's also pretty much an open secret that most university decisions follow a "customer-centered" model. I'm sure there are faculty members at this place in question that never have had a teaching evaluation that mattered; I'm also have a strong hunch that teaching evaluations factor quite strongly in many hiring and "letting go" decisions, particularly in the humanities. It's part of making sure the students keep coming back for more.

2
Schools don't care about instruction quality. They just don't, because it does not matter to their business model. Good teaching does not increase donations or grants. Good teaching does not increase application numbers or quality of applicants. Good teaching does not really increase prestige in US News or Times Higher Ed rankings. When parents or students pay tuition, they are not paying for instruction. Tuition is paid for the credential that comes at the end and all related career advancement opportunities. Very few people--parents and students included--care about instruction quality in the end.

Well, in a sense, exactly. How we both likely differ with those who run institutions like the one I impugn above is regarding what constitutes "good instruction." They define it as "what the students like," quality be damned. Thus, the credential is worth to a certain extent what it's printed on. I suppose if everyone drinks this kind of Kool-aid, instructional standards will continue to sink as credentials continue to be issued. No one will care until planes start crashing and our electrical grid goes down.

2
As for the economic reality of academics being similar to other professions: this is untrue. Very few professions work this way. Academics go to school after college for about 4-7 years and then often have postdocs, fellowships, etc. The universities try to increase the number of grad students, because that provides them with cheap labor for teaching and research, but they don't care that these grad students can't get jobs when they graduate.

I overstepped my bounds here. I guess I meant "professions" in the sense of white-collar jobs with a modicum of respect. What you say about the academic "difference"—really, just another screw job—is spot on, of course.

2
Unlike doctors, lawyers, nurses, academics do not have their value increased by government regulations requiring that all instructors meet certain standards of competency. Therefore, sometimes unqualified or immoral people take jobs from the well-trained. (I could name names of famous "professors" who are former terrorists, famous criminals, or just people who once wrote a book but lack real expertise, but if I did so I'd risk insulting political sensibilities on both sides).

Would that we did! I wish there was a qualifying exam in my super-flabby discipline. Trouble for the untalented.

2
Tenure has also done great harm to the younger generation of academics. Many older academics see no reason to retire, because they make the top salary they can, they teach jsut a few classes they have taught for many years, and they often work with the assistance of TAs. Many older tenured professors, especially at the mid-range schools, are actually surpassed in accomplishment by the much younger non-tenure track academics at the same schools. The older professors just benefited from better much job markets in the 60s, 70s, and 80s. Eventually these older professors will die, but it will be too late for the current younger generation. Moreover, the movement away from tenure and even toward more adjuncts, means many fewer overall opportunities for new academics despite the fact that more undergrads are in college than ever before.

Agreed, in a restricted sense. That many Bâby Boomer-era professors are holding on by their fingernails, trying to ameliorate the retirement tanking, is not helping anyone. But without tenure, what's to prevent universities from jettisoning "productive but not willing to kill themselves" older academics with things like families and hobbies in favor of the newly-minted masses yearning to make below a living wage?

2
But then she got to the department of about 2 dozen faculty members and found out that there was an administrative office with 5 administrative all making more money than she did. One administrator had only two jobs: she scanned documents and xeroxed documents for the department. Even the photocopy lady made more money than the young academic who had spent 6 years in graduate school, was one of only a handful of experts in the world in her very relevant field, and who was being tasked with teaching some of the more well-attend classes in the department. Teaching is supposed to be the main role of a university, but teaching is not valued. Making photocopies is more valued.

Quoted for truth: I've come across similar stories. Bloated administrative budgets, at the primary, secondary, and higher education levels, are a major evil.

2
Cornell is one of the better schools when it comes to the percentage of instructors who are tenure track. It is estimated that over 76% of faculty at Cornell is tenure track. This is likely mostly due to Ithaca's remote geographic location, away from a large enough supply of highly trained PhD experts.

To this specific point, I think you hit the nail right on the head.

I have no specific data to back it up (lots of anecdotal "evidence", but I strongly suspect that the most important factor in the rise of adjunct faculty as a percentage of academic faculty is the glut of Ph.D.s. Over the past 2+ decades, far more people pursued a career in academia than there were jobs to support them. It's great for industry: my company, for instance, benefits from the huge salary differential between academia and industry through the employment of some very smart and highly-educated people who either couldn't or didn't want to engage with the academic rat race. But that's probably an option open only to those in STEM fields: I'm not sure a Ph.D. in English qualifies someone for a challenging job or a high salary in private industry.

But, like $150 oil, anyone who thinks this is going to last forever is not paying attention to history. In a free market, surplus and scarcity both sow the seeds of their own destruction.

Does anyone else get tired of this academic bleating? No one put a gun to the heads of all these PHD's and said, "You must work for crappy wages in a demeaning job." For that matter, no one put a gun to their heads and said "You must go to grad school and get a PHD." Sorry, but if you are a 22 year old BS or BA and you decide to get a PHD there is no shortage of information about what the job market looks like when you make your decision. If you made the decision just to avoid the "real world" why should the rest of us care, it is your life. If you do not like what is on offer in the world of academia the find something else. Millions of other workers in this country have had to. Time to grow up.

Towerroad
Does anyone else get tired of this academic bleating? No one put a gun to the heads of all these PHD's and said, "You must work for crappy wages in a demeaning job." For that matter, no one put a gun to their heads and said "You must go to grad school and get a PHD." Sorry, but if you are a 22 year old BS or BA and you decide to get a PHD there is no shortage of information about what the job market looks like when you make your decision. If you made the decision just to avoid the "real world" why should the rest of us care, it is your life. If you do not like what is on offer in the world of academia the find something else. Millions of other workers in this country have had to. Time to grow up.

Typical. ::roll eyes::

"My life sucks, so yours might as well too!"

All occupations are under attack; academia is yet another sector of society from under which the rug continues to be pulled, i.e., where the conditions of employment are going through such rapid disruptive change that many of those who signed up under a different set of rules are feeling cheated. Most academics, regardless of what people like you and much of the rest of society erroneously parrot, did not choose to do what they did in order to "avoid the 'real world'"; rather, they chose, because of aptitude and interest, to pursue a relatively narrow academic path in order to do great research or teach well. (One might hope both.) It's the nature of the business that academics are not exactly well-suited to a variety of career paths—that's why they're rewarded, in a proper world, with things like tenure and the flexible scheduling necessary to pursue material deeply. Let me tell ya, they ain't doing it for the power and big money—that's for the academic administrator class.

Your vocation is likely the next against the wall as this anti-revolution goes on and on. And who will be out there trying to warn you before it happens? Those lousy academics. Who's trying to get your children to think more clearly so they might be able to help all our sorry asses? Those lousy academics.

Al DeFlorio

KeithK

marty
Assistant coaches hopefully don't have to worry about this.

A rather foreseeable consequence of government mandates.

It would be nice, Keith, if you would keep your right-wing politics off eLynah. It adds nothing.

In a manner of speaking, I'll back up Keith.

Obama Care (aka ACA) uses mandates on employers to expand the U.S. system of employer-supplied health insurance. The obvious answer is to abolish this system altogether. Why should employers be responsible for health insurance at all? And why should a government program open up this can of worms in the form of unintended labor-market outcomes?

(This is an entirely different question from why did employers start to offer health insurance benefits and why to so many of them voluntarily continue to do so?)

But if we step back, the problem is that disease is somewhat of a random process, so insurance is appropriate protection against the bad luck of disease. But health insurance in the U.S. has become so expensive that many can't afford it. So we have a choice. Do we say tough luck to those who can't afford it, stay healthy or die? Or do we decide that everyone should have protection against the literally crippling effects of disease? If the latter, we need a way to provide insurance to those who can't afford it.

But this itself is a loaded question. Health insurance in the U.S. is so expensive because the healthcare system is so expensive. Compared to other countries, administrative costs are high (I've heard 3 x Germany's), and so too are the costs of drugs. Come up with a standardized system so your doctor's office doesn't have to have a full-time staff dealing with umpteen different insurance companies, and you'll begin to cut costs. Control price-gouging in monopolistic drug markets (protected by government patents), and you will cut even more.

So now we come to see more of a solution. It's called single-payer insurance, and just about every major industrialized country that has it also has national healthcare costs much lower than the US's and healthcare outcomes that are much better.

2
This is not a political issue. The cut in non-tenure track (generally adjunct) faculty is directly related to federal government mandates, primarily the health insurance law. Whether you call it Obamacare or ACA, it has been named by the schools as the reason they cut the ranks and/or hours of non-tenure track instructors. This isn't politics. It is fact, no matter which party or politician you support.

I agree with you about the facts, although I think adversaries of the mandates overstate their impacts. See my earlier comment about Keith's remarks. My post starts with a factual analysis that most definitely leads to a political conclusion.

2
Cornell is one of the better schools when it comes to the percentage of instructors who are tenure track. It is estimated that over 76% of faculty at Cornell is tenure track. This is likely mostly due to Ithaca's remote geographic location, away from a large enough supply of highly trained PhD experts. However, that still leaves almost 24% of the instructors a non-tenure track. That includes visiting professors on one year gigs that generally pay very little with almost no chance of long-term employment. It is not easy to move to Ithaca for a low-paying one year job. It also includes adjuncts, only a small portion of whom are brought in from industry/practice, and most of whom are PhDs with excellent qualifications who work for just a couple thousand dollars per course per semester.

In general, elite schools like Cornell have higher proportions of tenure-track faculty. Schools in major cities, Columbia or Harvard for example, may have higher percentages of tenure-track instructors, but I don't think drastically higher than isolated schools like Cornell or Dartmouth. I'd be willing to bet SUNY Cortland looks more like U. Mass. Boston than Cornell.

2
I am not an academic, but there is no profession that has felt the negatives of economic upheaval in the last 10 years like young academics. We still value higher education and throw money at it, largely because of the unlimited student loan system (which is also due to government statute that practically prohibits default on student loans). Schools build more and hire more and more administrators for higher and higher salaries. Yet schools find new ways to hire fewer faculty and pay less.

There's so much bullshit in higher education today, and in the U.S. political-economic-social formation that a Princeton professor even wrote a book about it.

2
I love Cornell and root for its teams, but Cornell is quite guilty of this too. When I get a call from some Cornell student asking for money, I tell them no. Even with our poor investing performance recently, Cornell's endowment is about $2 billion, right? Cornell builds and builds. Cornell hires more and more administrators. Cornell raises tuition, now to $50,000/year before room and board. Yet the one thing they do not value is teaching and who teaches the students.

Most of us participating in this forum probably share this sentiment. We also probably share a similar attitude towards high-quality education and rigorous standards, not only because Cornell is an elite institution that sits firmly in this niche, but even among elite institutions Cornellians take a certain pride in that Cornell is known for low grade inflation, high student workloads, etc.

So this forum is a biased sample among people interested in higher education. If you go to RateMyProfessor.Com, you'll see one of the criteria for rating courses is how easy they are, with easier being better. How many of us would endorse this standard now, or even when we were still students (for the alums among us)?

2
One more thing. While I agree with Swampy mostly, I have seen significant evidence that neither teaching evaluations nor teaching observations are valued at all at major universities. They generally don't care about teaching ability at all. For tenure track faculty, departments care about research and (for sciences) grant receipts. For non-tenure track, departments generally care that they can argue that the hire has the expertise to teach the class(es) and can teach in the right schedule. Teaching ability is almost never considered at real universities.

I don't disagree with you. But I do think there's a big difference between, say, Princeton or MIT (Category I), Penn State (Category II), University of North Dakota (Category III), and Bemidji State (Category IV). The top-tier places can afford to look for people who are great researchers and great teachers. But don't forget, part of what makes someone a great researcher and/or teacher is a strong library, PhD students who can really help undergraduates, a budget that regularly keeps computer equipment up-to-date, a departmental enrollment and faculty large enough that each individual regularly gets to teach in their area of research, etc. It also depends on a culture that supports both teaching and research.

At lower-tier institutions, things are very different. There "teaching excellence" really means putting butts in seats. Research dollars at places like Bemijdi are probably so small, that the research grant-alumni donation model can't work. Instead, tuition dollars (especially out-of-state tuition) counts much more. So teachers better keep those little dears from Chicago and Milwaukee happy.

And at all kinds of institutions, university politics can put anyone on the spot. If the administrators don't like you and you have below-average teaching evaluations, that becomes a liability. Whereas if the administration likes you, then your teaching evaluations might be nothing more than a wink. The reverse also works. If the administrators like one professor and dislike another, the first might get tenure based largely on teaching evaluations even though the research record is weak. But if the administrators don't like you, no amount of evidence for teaching prowess -- not only evaluations, but also students well-prepared for subsequent courses, better average test scores on exams, in-class observation, etc. -- will not be enough to stop the administrators from using a mediocre research record against you.

Why they may not like you could because you're a junior version of Howard Zinn or Milton Friedman. Or, it could be because some alum or politician thinks you are. Or, it could be that some dean wanted to pad their own resume by merging your department with another, but you spoke out against this idea. One of the few good quotes from Henry Kissinger is, "Academic politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low."

imafrshmn
Thread drift be damned. It's intelligent discussions like this that keep me coming to ELF in the off season.

It's the off-season. This is largely the only reason to come here for the next few months. Even when the discussions are TLDR (at least while I am in theory working).

Swampy
Obama Care (aka ACA) uses mandates on employers to expand the U.S. system of employer-supplied health insurance. The obvious answer is to abolish this system altogether. Why should employers be responsible for health insurance at all? And why should a government program open up this can of worms in the form of unintended labor-market outcomes?

I can't imagine how anyone could defend the current system of employer provided insurance except by arguing that the transition costs and disruption of elmininating such an entrenched system would be unacceptable. What one would replace it, on the other hand...

CAS
The Cornell endowment is about $6 billion.

Cornell total endowment is sixth in the Ivies, still a lot compared to Ithaca College or Syracuse, not so much compared to the rest of the Ivy League or Stanford. Another way to look at endowment is endowment per student. Princeton has 10 times as much money in the bank per student as Cornell. If their endowment throws off 5% a year, they've got ~$150,000 per student; Cornell has $15,000.

School	  U-grad  Grad	 Total	  Endow(B)  Endowment/student
Princeton  5,113  2,479	  7,592	  $22.70    $2,989,989
Yale	   5,275  6,391	 11,666	  $25.60    $2,194,411
Harvard	   7,181  14,044 21,225	  $37.60    $1,771,496
Dartmouth  4,248   1,893  6,141	   $4.70      $765,348
Penn	  10,337  10,306 20,643	  $10.10      $489,270
Columbia   7,160  15,760 22,920	   $9.60      $418,848
Brown	   6,316   2,333  8,649	   $3.30      $381,547
Cornell	  13,931   6,702 20,633	   $6.20      $300,490
Data: Wikipedia 

Kyle Rose
But, like $150 oil, anyone who thinks this is going to last forever is not paying attention to history. In a free market, surplus and scarcity both sow the seeds of their own destruction.

One hopes this is the case. Is there any data that suggests the minting of PhDs is slowing down? (If I weren't such a lazy layabout, I'd try to find it myself. I hope someone else has done the digging.)

Perhaps when the baby boomers go, we all finally get to be paid for reasonable work.

And then pessimism takes over: fat chance.

Scersk '97

Kyle Rose
But, like $150 oil, anyone who thinks this is going to last forever is not paying attention to history. In a free market, surplus and scarcity both sow the seeds of their own destruction.

One hopes this is the case. Is there any data that suggests the minting of PhDs is slowing down? (If I weren't such a lazy layabout, I'd try to find it myself. I hope someone else has done the digging.)

Perhaps when the baby boomers go, we all finally get to be paid for reasonable work.

And then pessimism takes over: fat chance.

Even in a free market there is no guarantee that we reach an equilibrium state where there is no surplus/scarcity. There are other factors involved besides cold, rational economic decisions. People often make decisions that do not optimize the likelihood of future economic success. I expecte that this is especially true for younger people for whom the consequences of oor decisions are less severe (no family, no debt, more time to change course).

Scersk '97
All occupations are under attack; academia is yet another sector of society from under which the rug continues to be pulled, i.e., where the conditions of employment are going through such rapid disruptive change that many of those who signed up under a different set of rules are feeling cheated.

Isn't this the story of all employment ever? What exactly is special about today's job markets? I feel like people romanticize history a lot, glossing over the ugly details of what life was actually like.

Furthermore, in almost every respect life today is much easier for the overwhelming majority of people than it was a century ago.

People need to adjust to what others actually need. No one is owed a living for the remainder of their life doing exactly what they trained for in their 20's.

Scersk '97
You are quite right that young academics have been hit extremely hard in the last ten years, but it's really just a version of what's been going on the rest of society. Even in the STEM professions, I'm sure the wages of average workers have not kept pace in any way with the gains of the 1%. And yet no one seeks to unionize; indeed, unions have become more and more demonized at the second they might be the most useful, particularly to the so-called "white collar professions." (Professions? Not really anymore. We're all just labor units. Why do you think they want to get rid of tenure for educators?)

Over on South Hill, the "full-time contingent faculty" at Ithaca College have followed the part-time faculty in unionizing. [ithacavoice.com] Now the administration is trying to keep the two unions from joining forces.

Kyle Rose
People need to adjust to what others actually need. No one is owed a living for the remainder of their life doing exactly what they trained for in their 20's.

It's unfair that I can't make a living manufacturing buggy whips! Outlaw cars!

In all seriousness, I totally understand why people feel this way. It's a natural reaction to changes in the world that affect ones life negatively. I feel for them (honest, I do!). Life isn't fair though.

(This said by someone who works in an industry that often feels like it's stuck in the 60's. Just without the funding levels.)

Kyle Rose
People need to adjust to what others actually need. No one is owed a living for the remainder of their life doing exactly what they trained for in their 20's.

But what if what some scientist trained to do in his 20s leads to a breakthrough in his 30s in, say, cancer treatment: Does he deserve to be thrown out on his ass when he wants to scale back his research in order to better impart what he's learned throughout his career to the next group of potentially brilliant scientists? Or should he strenuously retrain himself (probably unnecessarily, from the pedagogical standpoint of teaching undergraduates in the great majority of courses) in order to keep abreast of "what others actually need?"

Never mind that some administrator somewhere might not have seen the monetary benefit in the course of research this scientist pursued during his 20s or 30s but was able to pursue because of the protection afforded by tenure. Nor might said administrator see the benefit in the research he pursues in his 40s that leads to another, unlooked for breakthrough. Bean counters are often pretty myopic that way. It has always been so, and that's why tenure came about in the first place.

I mean, Kyle, I know it's your bent, but how you're inveighing here against, one assumes, tenure is just another version of "my life sucks, so should yours." It's my problem with the libertarian take on labor economics in general, which seems to assume that one can and should just pick up and move on when there is no longer any need for one's labor unit in a particular situation. There's a whole lot of inefficiency inherent in all those stops and starts, some of it created by an economic system that isn't set up that way to begin with and some of it due to just being a human being.

Would that we were all perfect automata living in a libertarian utopia!

Scersk '97
Would that we were all perfect automata living in a libertarian utopia!

Sorry, but the utopia here is one in which you think someone deserves compensation indefinitely simply for the virtue of devoting one's self to research (or to some other pursuit). The real world doesn't work that way: in the real world, people get paid for producing things that others want, because producing things that others want creates the revenue stream that enables them to get paid. How did you get this completely backward?

I'd love to get paid for playing hockey. No one---literally, not a single person anywhere---would pay for that. Oh, well: I guess I can form a union of other shitty hockey players and lobby the government for support, or I can go do something that someone *will* pay me for.

One possible answer to the "Why should I be paid for life?" problem is for more professors to take ownership of their breakthrough inventions and use the proceeds from monetizing them as an income stream. And in fact lots of professors in STEM fields do this, because those fields are where the money is.

Scersk '97
Bean counters are often pretty myopic that way. It has always been so, and that's why tenure came about in the first place.

[ci-fucking-tation needed]. Considering tenure in US universities goes back to the 19th century, when professors weren't in the invent/monetize business and universities weren't in the bean-counting business, this sounds like a huge load of freshly-tilled horseshit. If you don't know, just say you don't know: don't just make up something obviously easily fact-checked and post it in a public forum.

Responding to Kyle, I want to raise three issues.

1. How do you propose to protect academic freedom, or do you not care about academic freedom?

2. By what criteria and process do you propose to decide how and what universities should teach?

You seem to be assuming universities currently make these decisions mainly in response to market signals. But this is not true.

Moreover, even if it were true, one can cogently argue against using market signals and for any of several other ways of making such decisions.

3. Like Sansa Stark, who naively thinks the real world works the way it's described in "the songs," you seem to be naively thinking the real world works the way it's described in introductory mainstream economics textbooks.

It does not.

When one traces the history of Western economic thought, you find first (c. 1776) that Adam Smith had an eclectic and incoherent view of how capitalism works, David Ricardo made this somewhat coherent in a labor theory of value (c. 1821), and then Karl Marx followed this logic to figure out where profit comes from and turned the theory around, from one that endorsed capitalism to one that threatened it. By the late 1800's a new school of economics developed with the explicit political goal of countering Marx. It did so by jettisoning the labor theory of value. This new "neoclassical" introduced a thin patina resembling some sciences by emphasizing mathematics. It also codified nineteenth-century liberal thought by axiomatizing some of liberalism's fundamental beliefs. Nonetheless, most of it turns out to be bunk.

You seem to be assuming the real world works according to the liberal utopia of mainstream economics. Many people, especially most rich people, do not get paid for producing what other people want. Instead, they get paid for some combinations of power, owning assets, shrewd business deals that transfer rather than create wealth, and dumb luck.

When Donald Trump licenses his name, what is he producing? What do hedge-fund managers produce? When Microsoft started out, what did Bill Gates produce except for his business acumen of buying the rights to D.R. DOS and then licensing it to IBM?

You might be able to argue advertising agencies produce ads their clients want, but not without jeopardizing your underlying assumption that the clients' sell to customers who buy what they (customers) genuinely want rather than what they were duped into buying by slick advertising.

Scersk '97

Towerroad
Does anyone else get tired of this academic bleating? No one put a gun to the heads of all these PHD's and said, "You must work for crappy wages in a demeaning job." For that matter, no one put a gun to their heads and said "You must go to grad school and get a PHD." Sorry, but if you are a 22 year old BS or BA and you decide to get a PHD there is no shortage of information about what the job market looks like when you make your decision. If you made the decision just to avoid the "real world" why should the rest of us care, it is your life. If you do not like what is on offer in the world of academia the find something else. Millions of other workers in this country have had to. Time to grow up.

Typical. ::roll eyes::

"My life sucks, so yours might as well too!"

All occupations are under attack; academia is yet another sector of society from under which the rug continues to be pulled, i.e., where the conditions of employment are going through such rapid disruptive change that many of those who signed up under a different set of rules are feeling cheated. Most academics, regardless of what people like you and much of the rest of society erroneously parrot, did not choose to do what they did in order to "avoid the 'real world'"; rather, they chose, because of aptitude and interest, to pursue a relatively narrow academic path in order to do great research or teach well. (One might hope both.) It's the nature of the business that academics are not exactly well-suited to a variety of career paths—that's why they're rewarded, in a proper world, with things like tenure and the flexible scheduling necessary to pursue material deeply. Let me tell ya, they ain't doing it for the power and big money—that's for the academic administrator class.

Your vocation is likely the next against the wall as this anti-revolution goes on and on. And who will be out there trying to warn you before it happens? Those lousy academics. Who's trying to get your children to think more clearly so they might be able to help all our sorry asses? Those lousy academics.

Just for the record, my life does not suck, it is actually pretty good but I have had to adapt over the course of my career which has included being laid off, changing jobs, and changing roles. It is not easy but no one every promised me easy. As for being rewarded in a proper world that is complete baloney. There is no such thing. Nature hates species that are over specialized, they get creamed when things change. If your argument is that academics are only fit to do one thing then they are in a very very high risk profession.

Swampy
Responding to Kyle, I want to raise three issues.

1. How do you propose to protect academic freedom, or do you not care about academic freedom?

2. By what criteria and process do you propose to decide how and what universities should teach?

You seem to be assuming universities currently make these decisions mainly in response to market signals. But this is not true.

Moreover, even if it were true, one can cogently argue against using market signals and for any of several other ways of making such decisions.

Our very own Andrew Dickson White, for example, wanted to create a university that was free of religious, political, and commercial influences. One where students would learn for the sake of gaining knowledge, rather than for some instrumental purpose. Since education transforms people, you'd have to set things up so that they come for some purposes, but then you educate them, and their wants would change.

So in White's case, he had a vision of what he wanted a university to do and be, and this was part of a larger vision of what he wanted the world to become. He also had a strategy for going from here to there, but the vision itself explicitly excluded market ("commercial" ) influences. And, White being White, he surely could justify this by something other than market dictates.

3. Like Sansa Stark, who naively thinks the real world works the way it's described in "the songs," you seem to be naively thinking the real world works the way it's described in introductory mainstream economics textbooks.

It does not.

When one traces the history of Western economic thought, you find first (c. 1776) that Adam Smith had an eclectic and incoherent view of how capitalism works, David Ricardo made this somewhat coherent in a labor theory of value (c. 1821), and then Karl Marx followed this logic to figure out where profit comes from and in the process turned the theory around, from one that endorses capitalism to one that criticizes and threatens it (c. 1864). By the late 1800's a new school of economics developed with the explicit political goal of countering Marx. It did so by jettisoning the labor theory of value. This new "neoclassical" school introduced a thin patina of resemblance to physics by emphasizing mathematics. It also codified nineteenth-century liberal thought by axiomatizing some of liberalism's fundamental beliefs. Nonetheless, most of it turned out to be bunk.

You seem to be assuming the real world works according to the liberal utopia of mainstream economics. Many people, especially most rich people, do not get paid for producing what other people want. Instead, they get paid for some combinations of power, owning assets, shrewd business deals that transfer rather than create wealth, and dumb luck.

When Donald Trump licenses his name, what is he producing? What do hedge-fund managers produce? When Microsoft started out, what did Bill Gates produce except for his business acumen of buying the rights to D.R. DOS and then licensing it to IBM?

You might be able to argue advertising agencies produce ads their clients want, but not without jeopardizing your underlying assumption that the clients' sell to customers who buy what they (customers) genuinely want rather than what they were duped into buying by slick advertising.

Given that I have a job (producing things other people want to pay for), I'm going to pick and choose here. Sorry.

Swampy
Responding to Kyle, I want to raise three issues.

1. How do you propose to protect academic freedom, or do you not care about academic freedom?

Not my job, but since you asked: Cornell and other universities have a mission, one that to my understanding they've really strayed from by being bean counters. Higher education is big business today: calling universities "non-profit" is really kind of a joke nowadays. I think academic freedom has suffered as a result of a variety of factors, bean counting being only one.

2. By what criteria and process do you propose to decide how and what universities should teach?

Again, not my job. But I think they should be guided by their mission.

IMO, universities are trying to straddle two conflicting worlds: the ivory tower bubble of a public service mission and donations to support that (the image), and the business world of earning their revenue through production (the reality). They are actively trying to have it both ways. A lot of people (myself included) will not give money to Cornell while they're actually focused on the latter while pretending they're entirely in the former.

Your question isn't answerable in isolation, because it is impacted by public policy (e.g., what educational fields should government, *not* in the ivory tower bubble, be subsidizing?), among other factors. Ask a more precise question.

You seem to be assuming universities currently make these decisions mainly in response to market signals. But this is not true.

The evidence, such as the rise of adjunct faculty, strongly suggests they are.

Higher education is big business today. The sooner people acknowledge that, the sooner society (individuals and government/public policy) can come to a more coherent way of structuring and financing it.

3. Like Sansa Stark, who naively thinks the real world works the way it's described in "the songs," you seem to be naively thinking the real world works the way it's described in introductory mainstream economics textbooks.

It does not.

Please don't tell me what I think. You don't know me.

You seem to be assuming the real world works according to the liberal utopia of mainstream economics.

I absolutely do not. In the micro-scale, people get paid for a variety of reasons. But at the macro-scale, institutions survive only when they provide value that others are willing to pay for. Things can get quite irrational (e.g., Enron, Worldcom), but eventually unsustainable financial structures fail.

In the real world, no corporation wants to be in the business of financing failed ventures. Sometimes, waste is unavoidable: R&D doesn't always pan out, business plans are often based on bad assumptions, market conditions change, people lie, etc. But any rational business owner wants to minimize the amount of waste per dollar of revenue, because they need to compete against other businesses also looking to maximize efficiency, because the more efficient business will be able to grow more quickly, all other things being equal.

Consequently, the opportunity to get guaranteed income for life without a requirement to produce anything is going to be rare. The economy has to produce *something* of value to have enough profit to support its Einsteins. There's still too much scarcity for everyone to get paid to do nothing. And that's what capitalism is for: to allocate scarce resources. In a world without scarcity, it wouldn't work; we'd need some other system.

But there is enough surplus value thrown off by capitalism to support bubbles of speculative or even negative value. The academy used to have a very different financing model from today: it relied primarily on philanthropy, and on the vision and patience of its rich patrons, to finance its operations. In such a world, no one was computing P&L: they had a mission, and people willing to fund it irrespective of profitability. Done and done.

That has entirely changed. Higher education is now mostly big business, both upwards (R&D) and downwards (education). It still manages to rake in a lot of philanthropic gifts, I suspect mostly because it has been successful in maintaining the traditional image of the public service organization while in fact being a cutthroat, penny-pinching, dollar-extracting, competitive enterprise.

Tenure makes sense in the traditional academy. It doesn't make nearly as much sense in the modern business of higher education in which the bottom line is king. Not making a value judgment here; mostly trying to offer an explanation as to why tenure is disappearing.

You seem to be assuming the real world works according to the (editor's addition: Neo-)liberal utopia of mainstream economics. Many people, especially most rich people, do not get paid for producing what other people want. Instead, they get paid for some combinations of power, owning assets, shrewd business deals that transfer rather than create wealth, and dumb luck.

When Donald Trump licenses his name, what is he producing? What do hedge-fund managers produce? When Microsoft started out, what did Bill Gates produce except for his business acumen of buying the rights to D.R. DOS and then licensing it to IBM?

You might be able to argue advertising agencies produce ads their clients want, but not without jeopardizing your underlying assumption that the clients' sell to customers who buy what they (customers) genuinely want rather than what they were duped into buying by slick advertising.

Put another way:

In an age of big business, it is unrealistic to think only of markets of the classical kind. Big businesses set their own terms in the marketplace, and use their combined resources for advertising programmes to support demand for their own products. As a result, individual preferences actually reflect the preferences of entrenched corporations, a "dependence effect", and the economy as a whole is geared to irrational goals.

In The New Industrial State (J. K.) Galbraith argues that economic decisions are planned by a private bureaucracy, a technostructure of experts who manipulate marketing and public relations channels. This hierarchy is self-serving, profits are no longer the prime motivator, and even managers are not in control. Because they are the new planners, corporations detest risk, requiring steady economic and stable markets. They recruit governments to serve their interests with fiscal and monetary policy.

While the goals of an affluent society and complicit government serve the irrational technostructure, public space is simultaneously impoverished. Galbraith paints the picture of stepping from penthouse villas on to unpaved streets, from landscaped gardens to unkempt public parks.

tl; dr: The past 30 years has completely refuted all Austrian assumptions about economics, which is unsurprising since it prides itself on ignoring all history and empirical data and springing as inerrant revelation from the head of Carl Menger.

I would take Swampy's argument one step further in this particular case. Swampy, if this is not what you mean, I apologize.

In the case of academics, we know that their special ability to understand and then presumably instruct in higher level education is actually needed and wanted. There are more undergrads in the US over the last decade than ever before. There is a huge need for college level instructors. Teaching higher ed is not equivalant to manufacturing buggy whips. Unless we say that buggy whips are in ever higher demand, and they must still be produced the same way, but the buggy whip retailers have managed to pay only a miniscule fraction of what they used to pay while still charging consumers 3-5% more every year.

Also, while there may be some oversupply because too many people received PhDs, many of these PhDs can and do obtain work teaching in colleges. The problem is that this work is often adjunct (meaning paid a couple thousand dollars per course) or contract-based (lecturers, visiting professors, etc). Adjuncts cannot live off what they make teaching alone, even if they hustle and manage to teach 4 or 5 courses a semester across various campuses and online. The best case scenario for an adjunct who teaches 10 courses a year (an unreasonably high number) is about $25,000 a year. And the students suffer, because the adjunct can't and won't care about them. For lecturers/visiting professors, there is no job security. At will employment means you are employed until you're not. Contract teaching jobs mean you are employed until the end of the semester or the year. Then you need to find something else.

So we have a need for instructors (so many college students in over 2,000 US colleges) and we actually do have work for the instructors. However, instead of hiring the highly trained academics, most American schools have switched largely to the adjunct and contingent system. Since almost all schools have done this, they can all get away with it because there is no where else for most academics to get work. One could argue the PhDs should drop out of the industry and try soemthing else. Many do after a few years. However, many others struggle along or rely on spouse's income to make up for it. The argument that they should not have entered academia is a little misinformed, because the academic job market did not truly hit this level of depression until after the 2008 crash. Only in the last 2 years have we really seen new PhDs who maybe should have known better.

Many lesser ranked schools used to hire people with masters degrees to instruct only 15 or 20 years ago. Now, they can often find adjuncts with PhDs from decent schools and with fairly impressive scholarship. The industry has created this unbalance by their unwillingness to pay and hire. It is not a supply and demand issue.

The market does not work like we're taught on a supply/demand curve.

"Many lesser ranked schools used to hire people with masters degrees to instruct only 15 or 20 years ago. Now, they can often find adjuncts with PhDs from decent schools and with fairly impressive scholarship. The industry has created this unbalance by their unwillingness to pay and hire. It is not a supply and demand issue. "

This is the essence of supply and demand" ie too much supply and too little demand. The results are very predictable, downward pressure on prices (wages). The bleating here is because some people made bad career decisions and don't want to be accountable for their bad decisions.

I don't understand how you go from:

2
Many lesser ranked schools used to hire people with masters degrees to instruct only 15 or 20 years ago. Now, they can often find adjuncts with PhDs from decent schools and with fairly impressive scholarship.

directly to:

2
The industry has created this unbalance by their unwillingness to pay and hire. It is not a supply and demand issue.

You're missing some steps. What actually happened was:

(1) Stable equilibrium at tenure and high pay
(2) Surplus of PhDs created
(3) Unstable equilibrium at tenure and high pay
(4) Unstable equilibrium flipped to adjunct employment via "unwillingness to pay and hire"

You seem to be arguing that #4 is the root of the problem here. Maybe you're right in the ivory tower bubble world that this goes against higher education's supposed mission, but we're not in that world anymore. We're in the higher-ed-as-big-business world. The progression of 2->3->4 is inevitable in this world.

You can try to fight the battle against #4, but I don't think there's a viable solution there without a major restructuring of higher ed's finance model. My statement earlier:

Kyle Rose
But, like $150 oil, anyone who thinks this is going to last forever is not paying attention to history. In a free market, surplus and scarcity both sow the seeds of their own destruction.

was targeted directly at #2. Reducing the PhD surplus has the proper incentives for all parties, which means it's likely to happen and likely to be effective.

Towerroad
"Many lesser ranked schools used to hire people with masters degrees to instruct only 15 or 20 years ago. Now, they can often find adjuncts with PhDs from decent schools and with fairly impressive scholarship. The industry has created this unbalance by their unwillingness to pay and hire. It is not a supply and demand issue. "

This is the essence of supply and demand" ie too much supply and too little demand. The results are very predictable, downward pressure on prices (wages). The bleating here is because some people made bad career decisions and don't want to be accountable for their bad decisions.

Both are correct. The oversupply of PhDs has allowed universities to pay and hire as they might have wanted to had no one been looking. They're not unwilling to hire now; rather, now "they" (because administrators have become part of "them" ) can hire how they might always have wanted to in order to maximize their own power and access to university coffers.

From your perspective, you hear "bleating": what you should be hearing is a warning cry. Corporations have usurped the power of governments, and those who run corporations are using what's left of the social contract—mindlessly adhered to by those who continue to tuck their heads under the sand and keep "gettin' 'er done"—to maximize their wealth and power at the expense of the proletariat, which is, at this point, pretty much all of us. What's going on in academia is just another symptom.

Scersk '97
From your perspective, you hear "bleating." What you should be hearing is a warning cry. Corporations have usurped the power of governments, and those who run corporations are using what's left of the social contract—mindlessly adhered to by those who continue to tuck their heads under the sand and keep "gettin' 'er done"—to maximize their profits at the expense of the proletariat, which is, at this point, pretty much all of us. What's going on in academia is just another symptom.

The challenge is coming up with a solution to this problem that doesn't make things worse. Because, as bad as it is for many individuals in many situations, capitalism is responsible for greasing the wheels of human progress to a greater degree than any other philosophy in the history of civilization. People often miss the forest for the trees, ignoring the great strides in productivity and its dividend comfort made possible by the combination of technology and finance. An occasional visit to humanprogress.org will restore one's perspective.

No, it is not traditional supply and demand at all. There is ever greater demand right now. While supply has risen because of more PhDs and fewer retirements, these PhDs are still getting work teaching. I just wouldn't call it jobs. They work as adjuncts (again making about $2,000 per course) or contingent positions. The schools still need them to teach and tehy are still teaching. A decade or two ago, these teachers would have been tenure track faculty. The schools just realized that since the whole industry has decided to pay so little, they can all get away paying so little.

In this case, the consumers (students) are paying more and more for the product and buying it at greater numbers each year. The retailers (schools) are making more and more off of this explosion in sales at higher prices. But the retailers (schools) have decided together to pay much less to the distributors. In the retail industry, there would be an anti-trust or collusion claim. I have no idea if universities have actively colluded to lower the wages for instructors, but the result is the same.

Since the retailers (the schools) are sanctioned by pseudo-governmental accrediting boards, the manufacturers (the academics) can't really offer their product directly to the consumers. A few academics have tried this online, but it is limited because it does not offer a diploma. The pseudo-governmental accrediting boards make the system an UNfree market.

I'm generally not big on organized labor, but this is what it is meant to combat. If/when more academics unionize, the situation may change. Of course, that would likely lead to other unforseen consequences as it always does.

As I said before, it is difficult to argue that PhDs who entered grad programs prior to 2008 or 2009 made bad decisions when the industry was entirely different until they started looking for jobs. It was the 2008 crash that convinced schools to utilize adjuncts and contingent faculty more than tenure track, and most schools have not since returned to offering real long-term jobs in any numbers.

Kyle Rose
The challenge is coming up with a solution to this problem that doesn't make things worse. Because, as bad as it is for many individuals in many situations, capitalism is responsible for greasing the wheels of human progress to a greater degree than any other philosophy in the history of civilization. People often miss the forest for the trees, ignoring the great strides in productivity and its dividend comfort made possible by the combination of technology and finance. An occasional visit to humanprogress.org will restore one's perspective.

I don't disagree at all, in the long view. I mean, I may be something of a Marxist, but I can't give myself over to true collectivism.

Yet the choice right now seems to be about restoring reasonable regulation to capitalism or plunging ever faster down the laissez-faire primrose path. You would say, perhaps, get rid of the (often corrupt) hand of government and an equilibrium will eventually be reached; I would say that I just want government to start doing its job again so we don't have to walk over so many chewed-up lives on the way to a new equilibrium.

2
No, it is not traditional supply and demand at all. There is ever greater demand right now. While supply has risen because of more PhDs and fewer retirements, these PhDs are still getting work teaching. I just wouldn't call it jobs. They work as adjuncts (again making about $2,000 per course) or contingent positions. The schools still need them to teach and tehy are still teaching. A decade or two ago, these teachers would have been tenure track faculty. The schools just realized that since the whole industry has decided to pay so little, they can all get away paying so little.

...because the PhDs have no other options. If they had other options (i.e., if the supply of jobs weren't constrained), there would be more competition for their services and therefore higher wages. You can torture it at much as you'd like, but supply and demand are still core to this issue.

I'll add that professors at major research institutions don't get paid (or get tenure) to teach. They get paid to bring in grants and do research, compounding the school's primary asset, its prestige. So your antecedent is wrong. You can tell how much they value teaching by how much they're willing to actually pay for it. They don't need "the best": all they need is "good enough to keep tuition dollars coming in".

Kyle, I think you are a little too stubborn on this supply/demand issue, and you seem to think that we live in a free market in the US. We don't at all when the market is controlled by regulation, licensing, and pseudo-governmental boards.

I would never say that PhDs are forced to stay in this job market, but to say they should just leave it is ignoring human psychology and the constraints of age/inexperience in the greater job market. It is a big decision for a person in her late 20s or 30s to simply give up on a career for which she trained for many years, and it is difficult to suddenly enter a new job market in a field in which one likely has no experience. In most cases, having a PhD hurts the chances of getting an entrly level job more than it helps. Neverthelesss, a great number of PhDs leave academia every year, sometimes for college administration and sometimes for related fields, but often for entirely new fields.

It is not a natural conclusion that becasue employers won't pay reasonably they don't need the employees. In this case, the employers do desperately need expert academics, because tehy are the only ones who can teach. However, they have realized that through a concerted effort by almost every school (individually or in collusion) they have managed to drasticaly drop the pay scale. This happens in large part because Academia has discarded the value of teaching in favor of scholarship as you said and, more commonly, in favor of administration. Why does an administrative assistant who makes photocopies get paid more than a PhD who teaches popular courses (see my post above)?

You can espouse supply and demand ideas, all you want, but the schools are an intermediary between the supply (PhDs) and demand (students), and the intermdiaries have distorted the market to take advantage of teh academics. I don't believe in government intervention, but I do believe that schools should be held accountable at least in public opinion. The best solution would be collective bargaining like they are trying at IC.

2
Kyle, I think you are a little too stubborn on this supply/demand issue, and you seem to think that we live in a free market in the US. We don't at all when the market is controlled by regulation, licensing, and pseudo-governmental boards.

Since you missed it before: STOP TELLING ME WHAT I THINK. You don't know me. Is that clear enough? Whenever you start a clause with "you seem to think", just stop and roll it the fuck back. Tell me what *you* think, because that is the only thing you are truly authoritative about.

2
I would never say that PhDs are forced to stay in this job market, but to say they should just leave it is ignoring human psychology and the constraints of age/inexperience in the greater job market.

I never said "should". I said "will". People like to eat. If they can't afford to eat on the fruits of their current jobs, they'll move on to something else, or starve.

2
It is not a natural conclusion that becasue employers won't pay reasonably they don't need the employees. In this case, the employers do desperately need expert academics, because tehy are the only ones who can teach.

False. The overwhelming majority of classes do not need to be taught by people who do research in the respective fields. I don't see how you can claim this with a straight face.

I don't know you, Kyle, only what you write here.

Most colleges do, in fact, need to hire experts with PhDs in the particular subjects. While less presitigious schools used to hire masters recipients a couple decades ago, it is tough for even them to do so now. When Cornell started, man faculty only had bachelors degrees as was the norm. Soon after there was a movement towards PhDs. Now students and their families expect instructors with PhDs. There are exceptions like grad students acting as the teacher or in literature or language where PhDs are less common. In most fields, though, and at most schools, PhDs are required as teachers. These PhDs need not continue scholarship, but they need to have that basic credential for the most part. That's waht the MARKET requires.

And PhDs do leave the academic job market, as I wrote, but it continues to hurt many of them including those who left the market. The fact that people can always look for a job in some industry is not sufficient to make the hiring system acceptable in our society. This is why we have labor unions. I happen to be quite libertarian, but even I see a need for labor unions for rare instances like this. There is something very wrong going on, and we are capable people from pursuing advanced learning, scholarship, and instruction. That could have serious negative consequences if we don't fix it.

2
Most colleges do, in fact, need to hire experts with PhDs in the particular subjects. While less presitigious schools used to hire masters recipients a couple decades ago, it is tough for even them to do so now. When Cornell started, man faculty only had bachelors degrees as was the norm. Soon after there was a movement towards PhDs. Now students and their families expect instructors with PhDs. There are exceptions like grad students acting as the teacher or in literature or language where PhDs are less common. In most fields, though, and at most schools, PhDs are required as teachers. These PhDs need not continue scholarship, but they need to have that basic credential for the most part. That's waht the MARKET requires.

You've shifted the goal posts. Now you are talking about credentials. Previously you were talking about intrinsic qualifications for the job ("employers do desperately need expert academics", emphasis mine). The two are not the same: just because the market requires the credential as a form of marketing/signaling doesn't mean the job itself actually requires that expertise. Teaching first year calculus does not require a PhD in math, even if Cornell wants that "% of faculty with terminal degree" statistic close to 100. It turns out that the premium for assisting in that stat isn't very much.

Since I'm sick of incoherent arguments, I'll ask my own question. How much exactly should a PhD lecturer be paid in relation to a lecturer with a master's degree and to a full professor doing research, and why?

I really believe you are just stubborn at this point, Kyle. No need to agree with me, but I think you are being intentionally obtuse. Also, your tone gets quite obnoxious as you keep writing. I'm not sure why you are so animated and aggravated. ELF is great because people don't take too much too personally compared to other internet sites. Please don't get so upset. It's not worth it.

Your question seems to me to be irrelevant. I can say, though, that an instructor needed by the school (whether she does significant research or not) should be paid a wage that incentivizes future generations to continue to take on these tasks in the future. As you say, people will stop becoming academics if this doesn't happen.

Let's take IC, for example. They most likely NEED someone to teach Shakespeare classes. They most likely NEED someone to teach introductory biology. They most likely NEED someone to teach basic linear algebra. If they do not have faculty who are currently willing, able, and available to teach these classes, tehy need to hire new faculty. currently, a common practice is to bring on an adjunct (say a grad student or recent PhD from Cornell) or a visiting assistant professor (someone who has not yet found tenure track employment) or a lecturer (typically either one of their own grad students given a job, a spouse of a local professor, a Cornell grad student who is given a real job for a semester or two). What I believe tehy should be doing is biting the bullet and hiring someone as a real faculty member. When they hire someone, they are more likely to get better service for their students because the new instructor will have incentives to care, they are building a better community of scholars at their school, and they are not contributing to the decline of lifestyle of academics. Most importantly, if they hire someone as a real facult member, they will incentive future generations to pursue higher learning and scholarship and instruction.

To acquiesce to yoru question, somewhat, I would say that $60,000/yr plus benefits would probably be a sufficient minimum for an IC starting assistant professor in math, biology, or English. That is not very much at all. If IC finds that someone lacking a PhD is sufficient to satisfy its customers (students) then I don't see why such a person would need to make less than a PhD. I jsut don't think IC would find it acceptable to have too many non-PhD recipients.

It is true that schools value scholarship and research above teaching. However, they hire adjuncts and contingent faculty to fill teaching positions. My argument is that this is wrong. They should be filling teaching positions with real faculty members. (Note: the vast majority of schools don't hire for research or scholarship very often anymore either. Hiring of tenure track faculty is just way down across the vast majority of schools).

2
I really believe you are just stubborn at this point, Kyle. No need to agree with me, but I think you are being intentionally obtuse.

No, you are simply not making a coherent argument. To wit, in the rest of your post you keep saying "should" (as in "should" hire full professors) without giving a single justification beyond a value judgment: "My argument is that this is wrong." That's not an argument: it's an opinion. Which is fine, but stop pretending it's the logical consequence of some obvious assumptions everyone here shares.

By contrast, my argument is entirely economic: this is the current state of this particular market, which means market participants have these incentives, which means some future adjustment will take place to achieve a more sustainable equilibrium. I think it's fairly straightforward, but more importantly it's something you can try to poke holes in: it's falsifiable. I can't poke holes in an opinion, so arguing about it is pointless.

2
Also, your tone gets quite obnoxious as you keep writing. I'm not sure why you are so animated and aggravated.

One of my pet peeves is when people try to tell me what I think. Talk about obnoxious.

2
You can espouse supply and demand ideas, all you want, but the schools are an intermediary between the supply (PhDs) and demand (students), and the intermdiaries have distorted the market to take advantage of teh academics.

I think this is fundamentally incorrect. There are two supply and demand pairs here. One is students seeking an education. To this they turn to colleges and universities. Here there is ever increasing demand (for a bunch of reasons, some good and some bad). Then there is the schools' demand for instructors. The schools aren't simply intermediaries any more than McDonalds is an intermediary between farmers and consumers.

At the end of the day a student's demand for education (or really, the credential of a degree) isn't affected by what his instructors are paid. Oh, sure one can make arguments about instructors being better if they're paid better and it mayven be true but I don't think that impacts the average student's demand curve. The effect of instructor salaries on tuition costs would likely be more significant. (Lets not get into a tangential discussion about whetheer salaries are a small fraction of college costs.)

Kyle Rose
The challenge is coming up with a solution to this problem that doesn't make things worse. Because, as bad as it is for many individuals in many situations, capitalism is responsible for greasing the wheels of human progress to a greater degree than any other philosophy in the history of civilization. People often miss the forest for the trees, ignoring the great strides in productivity and its dividend comfort made possible by the combination of technology and finance. An occasional visit to humanprogress.org will restore one's perspective.

I don't think anyone here would argue with your first sentence, but even Adam Smith recognized the need for appropriate regulation.

And making a reference to anything produced by the Cato Propaganda Institute destroys any credibility you might have had. It, and all the other Koch/Bradley/Adelson/etc.-funded faux think-tanks, are just shills for the oligarchs.

Al DeFlorio

Kyle Rose
The challenge is coming up with a solution to this problem that doesn't make things worse. Because, as bad as it is for many individuals in many situations, capitalism is responsible for greasing the wheels of human progress to a greater degree than any other philosophy in the history of civilization. People often miss the forest for the trees, ignoring the great strides in productivity and its dividend comfort made possible by the combination of technology and finance. An occasional visit to humanprogress.org will restore one's perspective.

I don't think anyone here would argue with your first sentence, but even Adam Smith recognized the need for appropriate regulation.

Where did I imply otherwise (in this conversation)?

Al DeFlorio
And making a reference to anything produced by the Cato Propaganda Institute destroys any credibility you might have had. It, and all the other Koch/Bradley/Adelson/etc.-funded faux think-tanks, are just shills for the oligarchs.

Blah blah blah Kochtopus Birch Hitler. Ad hominem. What exactly am I supposed to do, reference a pro-capitalism news feed curated by Mother Jones? Find me one and I'll be happy to switch.

Also, at some point try not making everything nakedly partisan. Take a look at humanprogress.org's Facebook page: it's mostly references to how good humanity has it now versus decades and centuries ago. Without mental contortions, I fail to see how that's partisan.

College students (or their parents) are buying a product pure and simple. That product is at it's simplest, a diploma that confers a credential which increases the students human capital. Colleges are in the business (yes, business) of selling "Diploma's", constrained by the need to maintain some level of brand recognition. (Eg Cornell is a premium brand and strives to maintain that premium). As rational economic actors colleges engage in production of "Diplomas" at the lowest cost consistent with the need to protect their brand. It is really just that simple, no different than making cars. Ford and Mercedes strive to purchase their inputs at the best price consistent with their brand goals and Cornell and Cortland do the same it just happens that their inputs are mostly labor.

You are correct, Professors are not really measured on teaching, they are measured on how much money they can generate for the institution. Rainmakers get tenure not scholars.

Al DeFlorio
And making a reference to anything produced by the Cato Propaganda Institute destroys any credibility you might have had. It, and all the other Koch/Bradley/Adelson/etc.-funded faux think-tanks, are just shills for the oligarchs.

This is just being belligerant. You might consider sometime that people who disagree with you may be doing so in good faith.

Kyle Rose

Al DeFlorio
And making a reference to anything produced by the Cato Propaganda Institute destroys any credibility you might have had. It, and all the other Koch/Bradley/Adelson/etc.-funded faux think-tanks, are just shills for the oligarchs.

Blah blah blah Kochtopus Birch Hitler. Ad hominem. What exactly am I supposed to do, reference a pro-capitalism news feed curated by Mother Jones? Find me one and I'll be happy to switch.

Kyle, this seems inconsistent with some other things you've said. Shouldn't you be looking for a book, journal, web site, news feed, blog, or whatever that has rigorous analyses that include well-researched empirical evidence, the results of which may be pro- or anti-capitalism? Or perhaps claiming that "capitalism" itself is not a particularly cogent way of understanding political-economic systems?

What you said reminds me of the Hoover Institute's charter, which defines its mission as combatting the ideas of Karl Marx. Nothing like starting out with a foregone conclusion and then looking for those arguments and sources that support it, while being close-minded about anything that might undermine the conclusion.

To be clear, I'm not saying you're doing this. (I am saying it's what the Hoover Institute is about.)

Oh, one other bone I'd pick. In one of your other posts, you called capitalism a philosophy.

First we have to define capitalism. I'd define it as an economic system in which some categories of people (capitalists) hire people in another category (workers) for wages, who then work under the control of the capitalists and produce things that capitalists sell in a market for money, so the capitalists can gain a profit. No society completely or purely fits this description, but this way of organizing societies became dominant in the west about 500-700 years ago. As such, capitalism is primarily a way that societies are organized to reproduce their members materially. It involves a set of social relations, power relations, institutions, social norms and beliefs, etc. All this historically predated the "philosophy" of capitalism, which came into being roughly between Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations (1776) and John Stuart Mill in the mid-1800's, or maybe as late as the neoclassicals around the turn of the century or perhaps even until Pareto a decade or so later.

To treat the philosophy as if it gave rise to the social system is very much casting the tail as wagging the dog. One needs to stand this on its head. But since the philosophy systematically overlooks certain things (e.g. emphasizing self-interest while all but ignoring altruism, elevating individual freedom while having virtually no conception of freedom to achieve things collectively or of systemic constraints on freedom, extolling market equality while ignoring or being sanguine about within-firm inequality, etc., etc., etc.), what's usually considered the "philosophy" of capitalism is probably better labelled the "ideology" of capitalism because it justifies a particular social order while systematically obfuscating and distorting our view of it.

Swampy
What you said reminds me of the Hoover Institute's charter, which defines its mission as combatting the ideas of Karl Marx. Nothing like starting out with a foregone conclusion and then looking for those arguments and sources that support it, while being close-minded about anything that might undermine the conclusion.

I'm sorry, but that pretty much describes the vast majority of economic and social science research, whether academic or non-academic. Plenty of science research too. Very few people are truly open minded on a topic they care about.

Gotta say thought, my close mindedness fully endorses doing whatever you can to discredit the theories of Marx.

KeithK

Swampy
What you said reminds me of the Hoover Institute's charter, which defines its mission as combatting the ideas of Karl Marx. Nothing like starting out with a foregone conclusion and then looking for those arguments and sources that support it, while being close-minded about anything that might undermine the conclusion.

I'm sorry, but that pretty much describes the vast majority of economic and social science research, whether academic or non-academic. Plenty of science research too. Very few people are truly open minded on a topic they care about.

Gotta say thought, my close mindedness fully endorses doing whatever you can to discredit the theories of Marx.

OK, so let's try baby steps to open your mind a little bit.

1. On what are you basing your claim "that pretty much describes the vast majority of economic and social science research ... Plenty of science research too"?

2. And even if that were so, why would it matter? Just because the vast majority of celestial observers in his day dogmatically followed church doctrine, should Galileo have thrown in the towel or would his results be intrinsically suspect?

Swampy
Kyle, this seems inconsistent with some other things you've said. Shouldn't you be looking for a book, journal, web site, news feed, blog, or whatever that has rigorous analyses that include well-researched empirical evidence, the results of which may be pro- or anti-capitalism? Or perhaps claiming that "capitalism" itself is not a particularly cogent way of understanding political-economic systems?

What you said reminds me of the Hoover Institute's charter, which defines its mission as combatting the ideas of Karl Marx. Nothing like starting out with a foregone conclusion and then looking for those arguments and sources that support it, while being close-minded about anything that might undermine the conclusion.

No educated person seriously believes that capitalism is ideal: in the process of enabling growth and turning science into progress, it grinds up a lot of people and spits them out. By contrast, a lot of educated people *do* seriously believe that capitalism is pessimal, or that the progress the western world has made over the past several hundred years has occurred merely by accident or (!!) in spite of capitalism. I find humanprogress.org a refreshing counterpoint to that warped perspective. I would rather be in the poorest quintile of the US today than the richest person on earth 200 years ago.

Would I want to be in the poorest quintile of the *world* population? Probably not, which suggests there's still a long way to go. But the progress that has demonstrably been enabled by allowing free people to pursue their own interests and voluntarily engage in commerce, mostly unrestrained by the need to prove something is good or effective to a third party before trying it, is amazing if you stop to think about it.

The developed world desperately needs the optimistic perspective to go along with all the armchair doomsaying promoted by mostly comfortable people in the top 5% of the world as measured by wealth. Capitalism is by far the most effective anti-poverty program in the history of civilization. Let's keep that going.

Swampy
Oh, one other bone I'd pick. In one of your other posts, you called capitalism a philosophy.
...

Don't care. Well, at least not enough relative to the other things on my plate. If I had unlimited time, I might want to get sucked into a side conversation, but I don't. Sorry.

Kyle Rose

No educated person seriously believes that capitalism is ideal: in the process of enabling growth and turning science into progress, it grinds up a lot of people and spits them out. By contrast, a lot of educated people *do* seriously believe that capitalism is pessimal, or that the progress the western world has made over the past several hundred years has occurred merely by accident or (!!) in spite of capitalism. I find humanprogress.org a refreshing counterpoint to that warped perspective. I would rather be in the poorest quintile of the US today than the richest person on earth 200 years ago.

...

The developed world desperately needs the optimistic perspective to go along with all the armchair doomsaying promoted by mostly comfortable people in the top 5% of the world as measured by wealth. Capitalism is by far the most effective anti-poverty program in the history of civilization. Let's keep that going.

I don't think many people would disagree with you about capitalism having beneficial effects, although one might want to consider if industrialization under a different set of social relations might have been similar albeit perhaps a bit slower.

But this does not imply that capitalism's flaws are not serious or that the benefits it brought in the nineteenth century might not someday be outweighed by its disadvantages (e.g., economic instability, unprecedented inequality, climate change, etc.).

And this whole line of argument is a big fat red herring. You said you look for pro-capitalism sources, and I said (based on what you've previously said about being objective and so on) it seemed more consistent for you to be looking for rigorous sources, whether or not they are pro- or anti-capitalism.

To me it seems contradictory to claim your argument is one of positive, objective facts one minute, and then to justify your sources by saying they're pro-capitalist the next.

Furthermore, one would hope your premise, about capitalism being responsible for human advances over the past few centuries, would always be open to examination and revision. For example, some economic historians maintain that slavery was the real driving force behind Atlantic capitalism. Considering this proposition might change your mind about capitalism per se, but in no way do I see how pointing to capitalism's allegedly progressive impacts, even if true, justifies considering only viewpoints that celebrate capitalism and ignoring those that are more skeptical.

Swampy
Furthermore, one would hope your premise, about capitalism being responsible for human advances over the past few centuries, would always be open to examination and revision.

Absolutely. I think you're reading too much into a rejoinder. The best way to interpret my statement is more simply, "You (meaning Al) are likely to have a problem with any source I am able to cite expressing in any way the viewpoint that capitalism might be a tremendous force for the improvement of living standards over time." Which is probably overstating things, but given how he parachutes in to lob a few bombs at people he doesn't like and then disappears, I've no actual evidence to the contrary.

Didn't think there would be this much interest about Cornell BB assistant coaches.

"although one might want to consider if industrialization under a different set of social relations might have been similar albeit perhaps a bit slower."

The alternative systems that have been tried socialism, national socialism, communism, imperialism, all produced positive results at a slower pace but also produced far far greater negative results.

Free market capitalism requires markets, markets in return require well established systems of property rights and the ability to enforce trading rules. That system of rights and rules happens in a social context driven by the norms of the particular society they exist in. For most of human history the owning and trading of human beings was considered perfectly normal (still is in some cultures). Capitalism was not responsible for slavery, the social norms were responsible for it. Capitalism and markets just provided a mechanism for trading. (I am not defending slavery just dealing with facts). Even after the US made it illegal to import slaves slavery and slave trading went on because it was an accepted social practice.

Towerroad
The alternative systems that have been tried socialism, national socialism, communism, imperialism, all produced positive results at a slower pace but also produced far far greater negative results.
[/quote

I don't believe this is entirely accurate. IIRC, both the Soviet Union & China industrialized at a rate faster than most capitalist countries. We can't always use England as the benchmark, since it was perhaps the most rapidly industrialized capitalist country in the world. I'm not talking about the human cost of industrialization, which high in all three instances. But, for example, Germany, France, and Italy industrialized at a much slower pace than China and Russia, and if we start to consider other capitalist countries like Guatemala, there's absolutely not comparison.

Then you have a place like Cuba, which has not industrialized so successfully (albeit more so than Haiti or Jamaica), but its health care and education systems are probably the best in Latin America. There's more than one way to measure social progress. It's not all about industrialization and producing commodities.

Towerroad
Free market capitalism requires markets, markets in return require well established systems of property rights and the ability to enforce trading rules.

Well again, historically, even in England, markets and capitalism developed unevenly. And then there's the issue of exactly what we mean by "markets." It's not as if King George abolished all the crown's rules, and poof! there were markets, so now there could be Manchester. Enclosures, for example, were neither markets in the sense we usually mean, nor industrialism. But they were absolutely central to the formation of labor markets in England. BTW, TANST as "free market capitalism." Certainly not if you introduce norms into the picture, as you've already done.

Towerroad
Capitalism was not responsible for slavery, the social norms were responsible for it.
[/quote

I'm not sure why you're bringing this up. Just to be clear, when I wrote about Atlantic capitalism and slavery, I was putting the causality the opposite way. The authors I was referring to maintain that without slavery, there would have been no capitalism, or at least a very different one than what developed around the Atlantic. From this view, capitalism was literally built on the backs of slaves. Think King Cotton and Manchester.

Towerroad
Capitalism and markets just provided a mechanism for trading. (I am not defending slavery just dealing with facts).

Well your facts are very incomplete. How can you leave wage labor out of any definition of capitalism? And when you introduce wage labor, don't you also introduce certain social classes?

Towerroad
Even after the US made it illegal to import slaves slavery and slave trading went on because it was an accepted social practice.

I don't disagree vehemently with this, but I do think it's a gross over-simplification. It's sort of like saying heroin trafficking happens today because its an accepted social practice. Racism, the antebellum Southern economy (and its complementary outposts in New York, Newport, London, and Manchester) where much more complicated (and materially connected) than simply by what was considered good manners. People's livelihoods depended on the institution. Of course they had a way to justify it, or they naturalized and thought it was just part of the order of things, just as today coal miners think burning coal is perfectly natural and predatory lenders justify predatory lending.

" both the Soviet Union & China industrialized at a rate faster than most capitalist countries" - This is not really a valid comparison. It is always faster to play "catch up" than it is to do something new. Now, if you were going to compare the capacity to slaughter their own people then the communists are in a league of their own. Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and the rest even pass the Nazi's in their ability to torture and kill.

I am not sure that Cuba's health care and education system is better than Chile's which is the only Latin American country in the OECD (ie they are a first world country). Chile adopted free market/capitalist principles and prospered.

As for capitalism being built on the backs of slaves, there may be an element of truth in that but so were a lot of other systems built on the backs of slaves. The slave trade existed millenia before modern capitalism. Capitalism in the US (as opposed to industrialization) can be traced to the rail roads, the first enterprises that required more capital than could be raised by a simple partnership. That was not built on the back of slaves. (The backs of poor day laborers is a different thing).

If you want to lead the world in prosperity, free market capitalism is the horse you want to ride.

Towerroad
[Railroads were] not built on the back of slaves.

Buzz!

Well, I guess you have exposed my North Eastern elitist bias. That statement was based in my reading "The First Tycoon" by T J Stiles, the biography of Cornelius Vanderbilt (an excellent biography by the way). Vanderbilt, at least in the US, was the pioneer in developing modern corporate capitalism, selling stock in a corporation to raise sufficient capital for projects (eg the NY Central Rail Network) that were too large to be funded by traditional partnership arrangements. These Northeastern/Midwestern rail networks were not built by slaves.

It is interesting to compare the density of rail networks in the North and South at the time of the Civil War.



This is the functional equivalent of looking at the Korean Peninsula from space at night and a comparison of 2 economic systems:

[www.gamefishin.com]

Towerroad
" both the Soviet Union & China industrialized at a rate faster than most capitalist countries" - This is not really a valid comparison. It is always faster to play "catch up" than it is to do something new.

OK, then. Compare China with India before China adopted its neoliberal reforms. Or, during 1920-1940 compare the Soviet Union with China or Poland or during 1950-1975 compare the Soviet Union with any Latin American country. Or, for that matter, compare Japan or Korea between 1960 through 1990 with just about any country that was similar at the start of the period. Neither Japan nor Korea employed "free market capitalism." In both cases, their development was both heavily directed by the state.

Towerroad
Now, if you were going to compare the capacity to slaughter their own people then the communists are in a league of their own. Stalin, Pol Pot, Mao, and the rest even pass the Nazi's in their ability to torture and kill.

That's why I put in a caveat about the human cost. But even so, I'm not certain how much of this was a necessary part of the economic development strategy versus political oppression or plain vicious pig-headedness by Stalin or Mao. I'm just trying to say what's so, not to be an apologist for atrocities.

Towerroad
I am not sure that Cuba's health care and education system is better than Chile's which is the only Latin American country in the OECD (ie they are a first world country). Chile adopted free market/capitalist principles and prospered.

First, some more history. Cuban Revolution was in 1959. Chile was ruled by the conservatives from 1958 to 1964. Then by the Christian Democrats (CD), until 1970. Then Allende until the coup in 1973. Until then, Allende was the first socialist president of Chile. Then after the U.S.destabilized the economy, Pinochet led the coup on September 11, 1973 ("The Other 9/11" ). The Chicago Boys, trained under Milton Friedman, devised Pinochet's economic policy, which led to an economic collapse in 1982. This in turn fueled the opposition, eventually leading to elections in 1988 and the end of the military dictatorship. The CD returned to power from 1990-2000 (actually a coalition -- all Chilean presidential elections involve coalitions). Then the Socialists returned to power under Lagos, and he was followed by another socialist, Bachelet, until 2000. The first rightist since Pinochet, Piñera, was president until 2014, after which Bachelet was reelected.

Meanwhile, bear in mind that with the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s, Cuba went through a "Special Period" of extreme economic hardship. It wasn't until around 2000 that the Cuban economy adjusted to this shock even remotely near today's normalcy.

Althogh analogies are hazardous, the CD's politics is sort of like the U.S. Democratic Party, and the Socialists (and their coalition) starts with politics like those left-wing parties in Europe (democratic socialists) and move to the left from there, including Greens, etc.

So bear this in mind when you view the following life-expectancy data. I don't know how to do tables in this forum, so I'll just give a series of triples like this: (year, Cuba's international rank, Chile's international rank). Here they are: (1960, 43, 69), (1970, 27, 68) -- Hoo Ha!, (1980, 15, 51) -- double Hoo Ha!, (1990, 27, 34), (2000, 30, 27), (2010, 35, 38), (2013, 39, 31). Source

I'll leave it to you to do morbidity.

But oh, BTW. Since you brought up Stalin and Mao's murders, for consistency wouldn't you also need to mention Pinochet's?

Towerroad

As for capitalism being built on the backs of slaves, there may be an element of truth in that but so were a lot of other systems built on the backs of slaves. The slave trade existed millenia before modern capitalism. Capitalism in the US (as opposed to industrialization) can be traced to the rail roads, the first enterprises that required more capital than could be raised by a simple partnership. That was not built on the back of slaves. (The backs of poor day laborers is a different thing).

If you want to lead the world in prosperity, free market capitalism is the horse you want to ride.

Again, reread your history books. Rome did have slaves, but it got them through conquest. IIRC, something like 50,000 slaves captured in the Judea war died building the Coliseum. Slave TRADE, did exist but was relatively minor until early modern times, and I don't think anything in history rivaled the scale of the Atlantic slave trade. (I may be wrong about this. The Mongol Empire certainly had slaves, but I'm guessing that was through conquest more than trade.)

I don't see how your map refutes my points. Southern slavery was primarily agrarian, and the Southern elites had little use for rail lines, except to ports where cotton and tobacco could be shipped. Northern capitalists, OTOH, used rail for shipping their manufactured goods. But this doesn't mean the textiles they shipped didn't directly depend on slave labor (think of all the New England mill towns), or that the money Northern bankers loaned to Southern plantations didn't get repaid with interest from slaves. Or that the money Northern capitalists accumulated by trading slaves did not go into other investments. Brown University was funded by money from the slave trade.

"But oh, BTW. Since you brought up Stalin and Mao's murders, for consistency wouldn't you also need to mention Pinochet's? "

As bloody as Pinochet was, he was a minor league player when compared to Stalin & Mao (or Pol Pot or the various Kim's). The death toll under Pinochet was on the order of 10,000. Stalin racked up between 7,000,000 and 20,000,000 (not counting WWII) and Mao (generally considered the Babe Ruth of murder) killed somewhere between 18,000,000 and 70,000,000 (nobody really knows, they are all dead).

You can't complain about the real problems that result from Capitalism, and then even remotely suggest that Communism produces better results.

"The death of one man is a tragedy, the death of one million is a statistic." - Stalin

While I agree with your basic point about scale, one has to take the overall size of the population into account. Chile's population in 1973 was about 10 million, whereas China's in, say, 1955 was about 60 times that. So scaling up Pinocet's estimated murders would be 600,000 in a country China's size. Not on the scale you cite for Mao, but still an atrocity.

Also, as you rightly point out, nobody really knows how many were murdered in these countries. But Russia and China both had revolutions and civil wars, which themselves account for many dead. Moreover, once the question of power was settled, the new regimes had to enforce their power while building a repressive state apparatus from scratch. In Chile's case, one branch of the government -- the one most capable of quickly morphing into a repressive apparatus -- overthrew the other branches (and had clandestine economic and military support from the US). So Pinochet consolidated his power in a few weeks rather than years or decades. Had Chile entered into prolonged civil war after the coup, as many had predicted, Augusto's scorecard would have been much higher.

To be consistent, you would have to apply your earlier point about norms. Here history is unkind to your thesis. Both Russia and China had long histories of autocratic, repressive governments. With regard to ruthless oppression Stalin and Mao did not fundamentally break with what the tsars, emperors, or Kuomintang had previously done. But in 1973 Chile was the longest-standing democracy in Latin America. So, if your thesis about norms have merit, one would suppose norms constrained Pinchet's regime, both in the sense that its members had internalized certain norms about murder and in the sense that even the regime's strongest supporters would be appalled by murder on a scale similar to Russia and China. It is relevant that Chile's most right-wing party at the time, Patria y Libertad, had "liberty" in its name.

Your statement about "Communism" is a red herring. First, until just now, I've never used the word in our debate. I think it's a misnomer when applied to the 20th century regimes that most often wore the name. Second, nobody has presented any argument that one kind of system NECESSARILY breeds these kinds of atrocities, and the fact that we so readily attach the names of individuals to them is testimony that the sources of the atrocities were ruthless dictators rather than the social system itself. Third, my points have never been to champion the superiority of the Soviet or Chinese systems. In fact, my point has never been to champion any system's blanket superiority. Instead, my point has been to criticize the blanket celebration of capitalism, especially when it is based on myth and quasi-religious faith.

The only point I would like to add here is please shut up everybody.

ugarte
The only point I would like to add here is please shut up everybody.

It's the offseason, there's no news about bball coaches. Let 'em talk.

KeithK

ugarte
The only point I would like to add here is please shut up everybody.

It's the offseason, there's no news about bball coaches. Let 'em talk.

I wasn't limiting myself to eLynah.

Swampy
Your statement about "Communism" is a red herring.

Scersk '97

Swampy
Your statement about "Communism" is a red herring.

+1