71–80 of 112 posts
We're very much the exception not the norm. As much as my mother believed I could be anything I would not be able to drag myself through university even without external factors pushing me down and throwing me around like a sack of meat.. for years..
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The low pay for scientists is very definitely related to it not being an accessible path for lower classes.
But they can offer so little pay in the first place because we've created a huge oversupply of people willing to do the work.
The scientists are in it for love. The people who have the money understand that the scientists will do it practically for free if they had to-- and so, they have to.
Poverty and social background remain huge barriers in all highly educated fields except for computer science/development/sysadmin. We're very much the exception not the norm. As much as my mother believed I could be anything I would not be able to drag myself through university even without external factors pushing me down and throwing me around like a sack of meat.. for years..
But it's recently become pretty clear to me that all the best opportunities I've ever been exposed to were through connections, and not all of those connections are attributable purely to merit. Had I not had these, I would be doing pretty well on merit, but the fact that I'm doing extraordinarily well is due to the fact that I got opportunities that many others never even had a shot at. About half of these were from family and friends, which has almost nothing to do with revealed merit. The other half was from smart classmates in my CS program, which is a little more correlated with merit. But it's not a coincidence that most of the people in my friend group were somehow similarly upper middle class. I had a really talented, smart friend group, but it's hard to imagine that coming from a similar background didn't have any affect on how easily we got along.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
The low pay for scientists is very definitely related to it not being an accessible path for lower classes.
But they can offer so little pay in the first place because we've created a huge oversupply of people willing to do the work.
By (imperfect) analogy, what you're saying is equivalent to looking at our crumbling infrastructure, lack of investment in infrastructure, and high unemployment among construction workers and saying "the problem here is an oversupply of construction workers".
I'd like to go get a PhD and teach, but it pays less than half of what I make as a software dev. I wish I could somehow teach science & tech and also make money.
I'm actually surprised well-off students choose science over well-paying careers given that it is well known that there is no money in research. My own kids and their friends often express that science is interesting but they won't get into it because of that.
I don't know what anyone else's story is, but for myself, everything was given to me by my parents. We weren't exactly rich, but I was certainly privileged. Whatever I asked for, I got. So, when a university education was given to me, I thought I could just "follow my dream" and not concern myself too much with making an income, because why should I? Making an income had never seemed like a concern, so I studied pure…
Are you talking about your math undergrad degree, or graduate degree? Pure math is perhaps a bad example here: in my experience, damn near every high paying field is glad to see a math degree (including seemingly unrelated fields like law, medicine, etc). I've done really well in tech and my math degree (both on paper and in practice) has contributed a lot to that success.
A math graduate degree is a little less of a definite pay-off, but I had a math PhD under me at Google who got hired in with no engineering experience whatsoever at something like 200k/yr. It took him about six months of a bit of handholding but he ended up being one of my most dependably talented people.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
But they can offer so little pay in the first place because we've created a huge oversupply of people willing to do the work.
This argument is circular: the "oversupply" isn't relative to the market's ability to pay, it's relative (broadly speaking) to the amount the government is willing to spend on the positive externality of available research. If the marginal output of a new scientist is low due to "lack of things to discover" instead of "lack of funding", _then_ you can talk about an oversupply. I've yet to see any evidence that this i…
However, in this case, the oversupply is so obscenely high [1] that you would have to allocate something like a fourth of the economy (roughly all government funding at all levels) in order to exhaust the supply and pay it the no-labor-of-love wage (i.e. a significant premium over the typical bachelor-educated labor).
(By the same analogy, imagine if we had pressured every schoolchild to go into construction. In that case, you would be correct that we're underinvesting in infra, but it would still be a correct to say that we over-pressured kids in the wrong direction, and that the correct level of funding would still not exhaust the supply of underemployed construction workers, and they would still need to find a better use of their skills.)
But I also think there is a case to be made that "things to discover" (through this mode) is being exhausted; it shows up as the "replication crisis" you may have heard of in the social sciences, where all the results fail to replicate because of so many people looking for whatever effect they can find and this inundates the system with false positives because it's the best they can get.
(Do you believe the above arguments remove the circularity, even if perhaps still insufficiently substantiated?)
[1] every schoolchild being taught they they need to educate themselves to the level of "prerequisites for grad school", while also receiving a lot of "advertising" for going to grad school
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't know what anyone else's story is, but for myself, everything was given to me by my parents. We weren't exactly rich, but I was certainly privileged. Whatever I asked for, I got. So, when a university education was given to me, I thought I could just "follow my dream" and not concern myself too much with making an income, because why should I? Making an income had never seemed like a concern, so I studied pure…
> when a university education was given to me, I thought I could just "follow my dream" and not concern myself too much with making an income, because why should I? Making an income had never seemed like a concern, so I studied pure mathematics. Are you talking about your math undergrad degree, or graduate degree? Pure math is perhaps a bad example here: in my experience, damn near every high paying field is glad to…
I wanted to keep doing math and that's why I was having a hard time finding money.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
It's definitely true that getting the manager at pharma company type jobs are hard to get, and lab managers are not paid super well. But: a clinical research manager has an average salary of about $94k in the US, while web developer not otherwise specified has an average salary of about $66k in the US. Restaurant manager comes down to $37k on average, Bath & Body Works retail manager comes up to $54k. Glassdoor lists…
A few thoughts. - you're comparing what seems to be highly skilled vs. more unskilled labor; (as well as more typically PHD requiring vs not) which if anything seems to support my point given that frankly the pays are similar enough. (at least compared to the delta you'd make using higher education to go into industry) - clinical managers (general lab managers as well, fwiw) are actually far more to the administrativ…
Maybe the difference between how I see it and what you're pointing out in your two points is that "failing out" or stepping out of pure science research into science industry/admin preserves or increases pay, while "failing out" or stepping out of business or communications leads mostly to unskilled jobs which pay poorly. The expected value of a job after a science degree is higher, because there are more good paths (even if some don't pay super-well).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What you described, where the money is at, is commonly referred to as "industry" and yes it is "science" oriented but pursuit of profit definitely changes the dynamic away from academic pursuit of advancement of the human species that, more often than not, results in failed outcomes rather than something that can make money. Who are you to judge and deride the "stupid academic dream" from which all those industries h…
There are people in business trying to advance our species and there are people in academia trying to burnish their prestige, make money, and get a job you can't be fired from.