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Elite Underproduction

troynikov.io

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Re: Elite Underproduction

#211

Post by rayiner »

ClumsyPilot wrote: post #190
rayiner wrote: post #158

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Both social sciences and cultural studies are quite self consciously meant to be applied to understanding and improving society. It’s not the study of dead societies, but our own. Culture, meanwhile, is the organically developed heuristics and norms of communities. You can measure the relative worth of these things by looking at the functioning of society on various metrics. Unlike say civil engineers, practitioners…

"Millennials as a generation are the richest ever" That's plain wrong, they have less disposable income and lower net worth than the two generations before them had at the same stage in their life. Just because stock market grew doesn't mean life of an average Joe improved.

They’re following the same trajectory as previous generations: https://economistwritingeveryday.com/2021/09/01/who-is-the-w...

This stuff is complicated so make sure you’re comparing like with like. Even the chart above ignored one critical adjustment: in 1970 just 5% of the population was foreign born, while today its 15%. Millennials are much more likely today to be recent economic migrants, or the children of them, than boomers. That drags the numbers down, but doesn’t imply anything negative about millennials’ economic status. Indeed, those immigrants are experiencing upward economic mobility, and are seeing themselves that way. The dour attitude among millennials seems to be mainly on the native born, who really are doing as well or better than their parents.

At least, they’re doing better economically. Thanks to social changes, they have less agency than their parents did. They have few opportunities to garner authority and respect in their communities. They’re not building families and getting the hope that comes from nurturing the next generation. They have many reasons to be dour. Their parents failed them!

Re: Elite Underproduction

#212

Post by rayiner »

kcb wrote: post #173
xyzelement wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not convinced that the rise of China will be so bad. Boomers and neocons want us to think so You're not convinced that going from "living in the most economically dominant and militarily powerful country in the world" to "not" is going to somehow not be a painful experience? You can use the "I am not convinced" line for anything. "I am not convinced that being homeless is worse than living in a nice house" but.…

Aren't you implying that every country besides the US is currently having a painful experience?

It’s going to be painful for Americans to adjust to being an only-ran. Consider how much of democratic politics right now is driven by the ability to run insane deficits to avoid taxing the upper middle class professional base. (Taxes on people making under $500k are still at Reagan levels and Biden promised not to raise them.) EU countries have to tax the middle class to balance their budgets, like proles.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#213

Post by rayiner »

civilized wrote: post #156
xyzelement wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not convinced that the rise of China will be so bad. Boomers and neocons want us to think so You're not convinced that going from "living in the most economically dominant and militarily powerful country in the world" to "not" is going to somehow not be a painful experience? You can use the "I am not convinced" line for anything. "I am not convinced that being homeless is worse than living in a nice house" but.…

What's the big deal whose GDP is bigger? You think China's going to invade us? Maybe it's good that other groups of people besides Americans and Europeans can make leading contributions to economic growth, science and technology. Maybe America's dominance is mainly good for the rich and those who like to invade countries on a whim. I don't care about either of those groups.

A lot of our ability to simply ignore reality—e.g. budget deficits, or comically high infrastructure costs—comes from having the biggest economy and being the most attractive target of investment.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#214

Post by thaumasiotes »

lmm wrote: post #210
thaumasiotes wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why?

Because if you pay less per worker then you can hire more workers for the same cost. I struggle to see how that's confusing?

I'll ask this for the third time, then:

Why would the other labs pay less per worker than the new lab?

Re: Elite Underproduction

#215

Post by thaumasiotes »

_delirium wrote: post #209
thaumasiotes wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had the impression that even at very prestigious schools lab funding is mostly from grants. I'd be interested to see how much of, say, the UNC Chapel Hill chemistry department's research expenditures come out of grants. Do you know how I'd find the information? Two other points: > Labs that don't have this often require either a business to subsidize their work or they suddenly become completely reliant in grants.…

Grants are definitely also important in academia, but at least the base salary of professors and some of the grad students ends up being covered by the university out of separate revenue sources (mostly tuition, but sometimes state funding or endowment), which makes it a bit easier. It also means that if you go a few years between grants you still get paid, and you can still get your grad students paid by having them…

> I'm not sure how to get hard data on what percentage of expenditures in a given department come from which sources, which would definitely be interesting.

Well, I picked UNC Chapel Hill as the example mostly because it's a public school and therefore (as far as I know) its budget is public information. Is that not true?

I'm perfectly happy to do the calculation in terms of "the chemistry department spend $X this year, and received $Y in grants, so their funding comes out of grants in a Y/X proportion".

> There are so-called "soft money" positions that really are 100% grant-funded. In academia, people with those usually have a title like Research Professor and they're expected to pay their own salary out of their grants!

I was aware of this (well, not that there was a title difference), but there is something I've been wondering about.

When salaries are part of the purpose of the grant, are they itemized in the grant? It obviously doesn't constitute corruption or embezzlement to help yourself to some of the grant money -- that's what a salary is. How much of it can you take?

Re: Elite Underproduction

#216

Post by jart »

cryptica wrote: post #132

This resonates with my own experience. It's an interesting perspective which requires a re-definition of the word 'elite'. I think the root of the problem is that value creation and value capturing are independent from each other. A well-functioning economic system should be designed in such a way that the two are intertwined such that an individual cannot capture value from the system without first creating at least…

Open source isn't about value capture. It's about doing awesome things that make people happy. When you do that good things inevitably happen plus it helps if you're coming from a place of security due to how you're sharing your inner creativity to enrich the world. That's how most of the big leaps managed to happen historically. Imagine an ancient agrarian society that produces a surplus of food. People who were harvesting the fields are now sitting around bored trying to figure out what to do, so they come up with things like logic and philosophy. Some figured out how to use it to conquer the known world. Some were punished. But the thing they all shared in common is that they were wealthy in knowledge, and that's the wealth that matters most. I like to think of open source as the latest modern recreation of that pattern.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#217

Post by chrisbrandow »

Phd chemist turned iOS programmer here.

I am definitely sad that a career in chemistry didn’t work out. I have lots of “Thoughts”, but I do think we fundamentally underspend on science, but I likewise believe the academic PhD system got out of whack with the supply & demand due to some faulty incentives.

No grand conclusion, but it’s a real dynamic.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#218

Post by anarticle »

"Lapsed biochemist" here, the incentives for maximally pursuing a career in science are not there.

10y in the lab, I did cutting edge science for I'm sure it's for someone, but it isn't for me who: is the only person in their family in history to have a degree, and is non-generationally wealthy. I paid my parents mortgage for years when they got laid off in 2008 on my academic salary.

Maybe American gentleman scienists? Nearly all the US grad students I worked with (NE USA) were from bonkers wealthy families.

I was a lab rat who loved the work, and got to see some things humanity had never seen before. The money just isn't there under the system we have. Over 70k in student debt racked up, paid off by software industry, not academia. All I could think in my last two years in the lab was: "This is it. I'm never going to be able to pay off this debt like this." pulling 10-12h days on experiment days, coming in weekends to feed the mice/cells/other lab bullshit.

No thanks.

Re: Elite Underproduction

#219

Post by lmm »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #214
lmm wrote: post #210

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because if you pay less per worker then you can hire more workers for the same cost. I struggle to see how that's confusing?

I'll ask this for the third time, then: Why would the other labs pay less per worker than the new lab?

Communication is a two-way street, if your questions are not being understood maybe you should put some effort into making them clearer.

Non-academic labs can't offer tenure because there's no tradition of it outside academia and by its very nature it only has value if an organisation can make a credible commitment to maintain for decades or centuries.

Labs that can dangle the carrot of a tenure-track position can pay much less than those that can't; workers overvalue it both because people generally overvalue potential prizes and because it's been gradually made rarer and pushed back further and further.

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