Cornell men's assistant basketball coaches named

[Rosey]

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.

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.

[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.

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.

[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.

[Rosey]

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

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.

[Trotsky]

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.

[2]

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.

[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.

[Rosey]

I don't understand how you go from:

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:

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:

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.

[Scersk '97]

"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.

[Rosey]

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.

[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.

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.

[Scersk '97]

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.

[Rosey]

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".

[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.  

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.