Cornell men's assistant basketball coaches named

[Rosey]

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.

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.

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.

[2]

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.

[Rosey]

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?

[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.  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).

[Rosey]

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.

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.

[KeithK]

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.)

[Al DeFlorio]

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.

[Rosey]

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)?

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.

[Towerroad]

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.

[KeithK]

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.

[Swampy]

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.

[KeithK]

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.

[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?

[Rosey]

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.

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.

[Swampy]

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.