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When are we going to stop being surprised that blind market forces don't always result in optimal outcomes for everyone? Nobody is designing these systems; they

When are we going to stop being surprised that blind market forces don't always result in optimal outcomes for everyone? Nobody is designing these systems; they're emergent.

gnicholas 8y ago
There are massive subsidies in higher education, especially at the PhD level (many are had for free, plus stipend). A system with only "blind market forces" would not have subsidies, and many prospective PhD students would look at the job prospects, the tuition bill, the living expenses, and the opportunity cost of working for 5-8 years, and decide to do something else. The fact that PhDs can be had "for free" is why so many people pursue them. This is a market distortion, not unfettered market forces.
- BeetleB 8y ago
  >The fact that PhDs can be had "for free" is why so many people pursue them. Yet it doesn't explain why they don't leave once they're done. Even the author points out how irrational he is. When I was in grad school a little over a decade ago, the realities of academic life were clear for anyone who cared to look. In his day, things were likely different - such information was hard to obtain. I know it's harsh, but if you have the brains to do a PhD in today's age, you have the brains to do a quick analysis on your prospects in academia. If someone gets a BS in CS with the aim to get into FAANG, and never does, and has a nervous breakdown because of it - I wouldn't blame FAANG or the software industry.
  - gnicholas 8y ago
    > I know it's harsh, but if you have the brains to do a PhD in today's age, you have the brains to do a quick analysis on your prospects in academia. Totally agree. For some folks, it's just an easy way to defer making other tough decisions, plus it's prestigious, plus there's optimism bias. And I think students naively believe that since universities create PhDs and hire them, they would not purposely create an oversupply of PhD grads. This feeling that universities are acting responsibly is probably bolstered by the fact that universities are nonprofits.
SilasX 8y ago
What do you mean? Someone is designing the subsidies for getting these students' bachelor's degrees in the first place, and for the research grants that later employ some of them as professors. What I think you mean is, the amount of money feeding demand for professors is not high enough so that salaries are at a dignified level throughout academia for for everyone capable of and willing to do the job, and so the market salaries (and fraction of the labor force in academia) don't make us feel that this valuable labor is being compensated correctly. But what would it look like for that to be corrected, and would that actually look like an optimum? Remember, a lot of people already avoid the professor track in awareness of the poor prospects. As you pump up demand for professor labor with nice, market-correcting grants, you draw them back in. If it took 25% of GDP to sop up all that latent demand to be a professor, and pump it up to a reasonable salary, would that look any more sane?
ardy42 8y ago
> When are we going to stop being surprised that blind market forces don't always result in optimal outcomes for everyone? Nobody is designing these systems; they're emergent. These systems aren't "blind market forces." A purely academic discipline controls both the supply of tenure-candidates (Ph.D's) and the demand for them. It's just like if you decided to bake some weird cookies that only you yourself like, and you baked more than you could possibly eat. You'll have to throw the extras in the trash, but then imagine those extras were people.
- marcus_holmes 8y ago
  not really, because the people themselves decide to study PhD's to alter your analogy: imagine there's space for 50 cookies in the cookie jar. 1000 cookies bake themselves. 950 are going to be disappointed at their outcomes.
  - ardy42 8y ago
    > not really, because the people themselves decide to study PhD's > to alter your analogy: imagine there's space for 50 cookies in the cookie jar. 1000 cookies bake themselves. 950 are going to be disappointed at their outcomes. Yes and no. The people did decide to pursue a Ph.D, but also they have to get accepted into a program to get one. It's like a job: I can choose to work at Google, but I can't unless they hire me. When the Ph.D programs themselves are the only groups that consume their graduates with their credential, they can perfectly balance supply and demand (and pretty simple at that).
    - marcus_holmes 8y ago
      Universities are businesses. They sell qualifications. Their customers are students. If there's demand from their customers for the thing they're selling, then they sell it... they have no idea if the demand for PhDs in that discipline is suddenly going to boom. The example of Data Science is telling: from too many to not nearly enough graduates within a few years. In Australia we had the opposite with geoscience graduates. The mining industry was starved of them, they were earning a fortune the minute they graduated, then suddenly the exploration boom stopped and the place is full of unemployed geologists. How is a university supposed to predict this? And I don't get what the alternative is...? Only having the same number of PhD students as there are tenure places? Refusing to let people start a PhD unless they can prove they have a viable career plan that uses it?

When are we going to stop being surprised that blind market forces don't always result in optimal outcomes for everyone? Nobody is designing these systems; they're emergent.

gnicholas 8y ago

There are massive subsidies in higher education, especially at the PhD level (many are had for free, plus stipend). A system with only "blind market forces" would not have subsidies, and many prospective PhD students would look at the job prospects, the tuition bill, the living expenses, and the opportunity cost of working for 5-8 years, and decide to do something else. The fact that PhDs can be had "for free" is why so many people pursue them. This is a market distortion, not unfettered market forces.

BeetleB 8y ago
>The fact that PhDs can be had "for free" is why so many people pursue them. Yet it doesn't explain why they don't leave once they're done. Even the author points out how irrational he is. When I was in grad school a little over a decade ago, the realities of academic life were clear for anyone who cared to look. In his day, things were likely different - such information was hard to obtain. I know it's harsh, but if you have the brains to do a PhD in today's age, you have the brains to do a quick analysis on your prospects in academia. If someone gets a BS in CS with the aim to get into FAANG, and never does, and has a nervous breakdown because of it - I wouldn't blame FAANG or the software industry.
- gnicholas 8y ago
  > I know it's harsh, but if you have the brains to do a PhD in today's age, you have the brains to do a quick analysis on your prospects in academia. Totally agree. For some folks, it's just an easy way to defer making other tough decisions, plus it's prestigious, plus there's optimism bias. And I think students naively believe that since universities create PhDs and hire them, they would not purposely create an oversupply of PhD grads. This feeling that universities are acting responsibly is probably bolstered by the fact that universities are nonprofits.

SilasX 8y ago

What do you mean? Someone is designing the subsidies for getting these students' bachelor's degrees in the first place, and for the research grants that later employ some of them as professors. What I think you mean is, the amount of money feeding demand for professors is not high enough so that salaries are at a dignified level throughout academia for for everyone capable of and willing to do the job, and so the market salaries (and fraction of the labor force in academia) don't make us feel that this valuable labor is being compensated correctly. But what would it look like for that to be corrected, and would that actually look like an optimum? Remember, a lot of people already avoid the professor track in awareness of the poor prospects. As you pump up demand for professor labor with nice, market-correcting grants, you draw them back in. If it took 25% of GDP to sop up all that latent demand to be a professor, and pump it up to a reasonable salary, would that look any more sane?

ardy42 8y ago

> When are we going to stop being surprised that blind market forces don't always result in optimal outcomes for everyone? Nobody is designing these systems; they're emergent. These systems aren't "blind market forces." A purely academic discipline controls both the supply of tenure-candidates (Ph.D's) and the demand for them. It's just like if you decided to bake some weird cookies that only you yourself like, and you baked more than you could possibly eat. You'll have to throw the extras in the trash, but then imagine those extras were people.

marcus_holmes 8y ago
not really, because the people themselves decide to study PhD's to alter your analogy: imagine there's space for 50 cookies in the cookie jar. 1000 cookies bake themselves. 950 are going to be disappointed at their outcomes.
- ardy42 8y ago
  > not really, because the people themselves decide to study PhD's > to alter your analogy: imagine there's space for 50 cookies in the cookie jar. 1000 cookies bake themselves. 950 are going to be disappointed at their outcomes. Yes and no. The people did decide to pursue a Ph.D, but also they have to get accepted into a program to get one. It's like a job: I can choose to work at Google, but I can't unless they hire me. When the Ph.D programs themselves are the only groups that consume their graduates with their credential, they can perfectly balance supply and demand (and pretty simple at that).
  - marcus_holmes 8y ago
    Universities are businesses. They sell qualifications. Their customers are students. If there's demand from their customers for the thing they're selling, then they sell it... they have no idea if the demand for PhDs in that discipline is suddenly going to boom. The example of Data Science is telling: from too many to not nearly enough graduates within a few years. In Australia we had the opposite with geoscience graduates. The mining industry was starved of them, they were earning a fortune the minute they graduated, then suddenly the exploration boom stopped and the place is full of unemployed geologists. How is a university supposed to predict this? And I don't get what the alternative is...? Only having the same number of PhD students as there are tenure places? Refusing to let people start a PhD unless they can prove they have a viable career plan that uses it?