I'm a software engineer with a pure mathematics degree. I can't speak for the "elite underproduction" bit but the rest of it pretty well covers my case.
Elite Underproduction
241–250 of 297 posts
Re: Elite Underproduction
#242Earlier quoted context omitted.
Like Einstein or Newton? Theoretical physics tends to be way ahead of experimental physics, it took 50 years from higgs boson existing as a theory to finding traces of the higgs boson in the LHC etc. Physics is done using the true scientific method. First you make a theory, then you make experiments to test the theory. Theoretical physicists made a theory and proposed some possible experiments to test it. Then 50 yea…
There's no Einstein without the Ultraviolet Catastrophe.
The Ultraviolet Catastrophe was discovered immediately after theoretical physicists derived the radiation law, the limit was theory and not experiments there as well. And the most important part here is that another physicist had already derived an alternative radiation law at the time that fit perfectly with the observed deviation and had a good explanation for it: Quantum Physics.
Edit: The problem with physics today is exactly like back then, we have no predictions to test. If someone comes up with a new theory that joins quantum physics with gravity in a way that is consistent with all past experiments, then we can test that. But there is no such theory today, nobody has figured out a way that the domains can work together.
Re: Elite Underproduction
#243Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pa…
> 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.
This would imply that it's impossible for non-academic institutions to offer pensions, too. Now, they are certainly moving in that direction, but it seems strange to argue that they can't.
Re: Elite Underproduction
#244Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 ye…
> it's a public school and therefore (as far as I know) its budget is public information. Is that not true? Public university budgets should generally be public information, but tbh I don't have any idea where I'd start looking for granular data, especially in an easy to process format. > When salaries are part of the purpose of the grant, are they itemized in the grant? ... How much of it can you take? Yeah, pay is…
> The grant agencies all work in terms of "percent effort", where you say what percentage of your time you're going to spend on this grant, and the amount requested is that percentage times your annual salary, plus a percentage for benefits.
This seems like it would tend to promote collusion between researchers and universities, where whenever somebody is hired into a soft money position, they would prefer to have a high official salary, and the university doesn't care because the actual salary is $0. The granting agencies aren't a party to salary negotiations -- what's keeping salaries down? Say someone's job is to get grants from NIH. Why would they ever be salaried below $200k?
Re: Elite Underproduction
#245Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pa…
> 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. This would imply that it's impossible for non-academic institutions to offer pensions, too. Now, they are certainly moving in that direction, but it seems strange to argue that they can't .
There's virtually no pensions in the US outside of universities. It's all 401k plans today.
So what are you talking about?
Re: Elite Underproduction
#246Earlier quoted context omitted.
"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…
Thats a good perspective and adjustment, but we know wealth inequality has increased, and a few billionaires can inflate that number unrealistically - it would be good to compare median and standard deviation.
Re: Elite Underproduction
#247Earlier quoted context omitted.
> the professions he lists are "lawyers, MBA holders,..." and later to finance. But these are the professions likely to be zero-sum. True, people with zero-sum, "I want more!" attitudes might very well self-select for the listed lines of work, perhaps because of the greater potential payoffs and arguably-weaker checks and balances there. But at the risk of sounding defensive, zero-sumness really does depend greatly o…
> MBA types are trained in planning and management, which, I dunno, have their uses I'm assuming you didn't mean it this way (I guess it was an ironic comment), but planning and management are incredibly important. The most important part to our scaling is how we organize ourselves. A top notch organizer allows a group of people to scale seamlessly. That's worth everything in the modern world. Imagine thousands of br…
> I'm assuming you didn't mean it this way (I guess it was an ironic comment), but planning and management are incredibly important.
I was making a joke; I meant it exactly the way that you put it.
Human efforts can tend to go in different directions. Without foresight, planning, leadership, and communication — MBAs get at least some training in these skills — the individuals within organizations can end up mutually interfering with each other, even when they don't intend to do so. So yeah, MBAs "do have their uses" (another joke).
Re: Elite Underproduction
#248Earlier quoted context omitted.
> a growing economy might organically increase the need for lawyers. I've long thought that; the need for lawyers grows non-linearly with population, because the need is correlated with the number of transactions , which would tend to increase (exponentially? factorially?) with population.
> the need for lawyers grows non-linearly with population, because the need is correlated with the number of transactions This is a cultural artifact, not a cross-cultural truth. The historical norm is to use zero lawyers even for the largest-scale transactions. It's still the modern norm to use zero lawyers for small-scale transactions.
> It's still the modern norm to use zero lawyers for small-scale transactions.
It's great when that happens — and to make it work, there are a couple of conditions that need to be satisfied.
1. All parties to a transaction need to know "the protocol," or "the drill," that is, how to conduct themselves as the transaction proceeds. (Imagine a complicated, multi-person dance where people could crash into each other if they didn't know the steps — or knew the steps but chose not to follow them.)
Competent lawyers can provide the necessary knowledge, but they don't necessarily have to be the sole source of such knowledge: Various industries have developed standardized protocols for different categories of transaction. Examples: the Incoterms [0] and the ISDA Master Agreement [1], to name just two that come immediately to mind.
2. There's another reason parties use lawyers, and contracts, in their transactions: At bottom, companies are just people [2], and people can be perfidious; at some point The Other Side might choose to behave opportunistically. Contracts can help dissuade such behavior. For better or worse, lawyers are one of the principal groups who (might) know how to draft contracts to that end; good lawyers know how to do so without unduly getting in the way of the parties' business.
Consider Alice and Bob, who agree to a contract on behalf of their employers Alpha Corp. and Bravo LLC. Each might be a fine, trustworthy, cooperative individual. But they're human; at some point they might be tempted — or pressured by colleagues — to cheat, or to seek unfair advantage, especially if circumstances were to change. Moreover, one or both of their successors Allen and Betty might be less trustworthy. This means that Alpha and Bravo's contract must guard against opportunistic behavior by one or both of them. Lawyers (can) help to negotiate contracts with appropriate roadblock language.
Again lawyers aren't necessarily the sole source of the necessary knowledge; it just happens to have worked out that they're one of the main sources of it.
Also, lawyers can be useful targets of finger-pointing by business people if a transaction doesn't work out as desired. That can be another, usually-unstated reason why people hire lawyers: To offload at least some of the risk of failure.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incoterms
[1] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/i/isda-master-agreement.a...
[2] In the 2012 presidential campaign, Mitt Romney was pilloried for saying "corporations are people," but in one sense the criticism was unfair: If Romney had said "corporations are just people," his statement would have been far more defensible.
(Disclosure: I'm a lawyer.)
Re: Elite Underproduction
#249Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
Thats a good perspective and adjustment, but we know wealth inequality has increased, and a few billionaires can inflate that number unrealistically - it would be good to compare median and standard deviation.
Wealth inequality has increased, particularly the upper middle class pulling away: https://www.brookings.edu/research/the-dangerous-separation-...
Re: Elite Underproduction
#250Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 pa…
> 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. This would imply that it's impossible for non-academic institutions to offer pensions, too. Now, they are certainly moving in that direction, but it seems strange to argue that they can't .
It would imply that prospective workers don't put a lot of value on private companies' pension plans when weighing employment offers, which in my experience is true (employees do perhaps value governmental workers' pensions, because the government is the kind of stable organisation that can make multi-decade commitments). There's also a level of governmental support (high-profile bailouts and the like) of private pensions that lends credibility to pensions, whereas governments seem if anything anti-tenure.