A few weeks back Ilya, Megan McArdle, and Arnold Kling had a go-around with the question of why academics are less happy in their jobs than other people. Assume for the sake of argument that is true, and I think there is some truth to it. I think I'm thinking along the same lines as Ilya, Megan, and Arnold, but here's how I think of it. This is all overgeneralized, but I think captures the essential dynamic.
Most Americans work in a money economy. The good thing about a money-based economy is that wealth is inherently a positive-sum game. Sure, there are some zero-sum aspects to it, but more money for by neighbor doesn't mean less for me. Thus, it is possible for all of us to get richer without any inherent zero-sum rivalry.
Academia, by contrast, is a status-based economy rather than a money-based economy. Status, unlike income, is an inherently zero-sum game. I can only have more status if you have less--status is all relative and positional. This means that at any given time those with less status are trying to gain more status. And those with high status are tenuously trying to hold on to their high status--with the threats coming from those with lower status trying to knock them off.
Now here's where it gets kind of twisted--given that the money-based economy is the default rule in America, who is it that are most likely to self-select into a status-based economy? You got it--those are are most motivated by status. So those who will self-select into the status-based economy are those who have a different tradeoff between status and income than the typical person. Indeed, the salary scale in academia is very flat when compared to that in other occupations, especially those comparable for academics such as law and business.
What this means is that we get those who are most obsessed and insecure about status entering into the status-based economy.
So I think this might explain some of the peculiarites of the sociology of our profession to outsiders. Outsiders often are baffled by the sorts of battles that consume academics and our obsession about things like whether our work is cited. "Who cares?" whether your article was cited asks my wife (well, she doesn't actually say it but you can tell she's thinking it). But that's the point--citations are not merely a means to higher income (as they would be in the standard economy) but in many ways they are the primary reward or income itself.
There is the old saying that "academic battles are so vicious because the stakes are so small." That's nonsense. There are middle managers all over America right this moment backstabbing each other for a nicer office or better parking space. What makes academic battles so vicious, I think, is that there is the status battle tied up in them.
Moreover, an academic's work is personal in a sense that most people's work is not. Your identity is tied to your work in a very different way from say, an electrician or a car manufacturer. It is an extension of your identity. So when your work is ignored or criticized, it is very difficult not to take it personally. Again, this reinforces the nefarious status dynamic.
So that's my view as to why academics are so weird. And why they often seem unhappy as well--it is difficult to be truly comfortable in your particular status ranking because there is always relative positioning going on. As Arnold Kling stresses, this suggests that the only way to be truly happy as an academic is to try to opt-out of the status arms-race: "Once you get on the ego treadmill, not only do you become bitter, but you have to start viewing others not for their intrinsic qualities but for their usefulness as stepping stones. If you can stay off of the ego treadmill, then success becomes more a matter of being near friends and living in an area with the type of amenities you prefer."
That's the main thing, I think. In talking about academics and happiness, however, as a purely empirical matter there is one possible other factor that might be relevant. And let me stress that this is being presented as purely correlation and not causation, positive not normative. Research indicates that those who are conservative and religious tend, on average, to be more likely to be happy than those who are not. To the extent that academics are disproportionately non-conservative and non-religious--which is plainly the case--as a purely statistical matter one would predict that academics would be less likely to be happy than the general population.
I was recently reading William F. Buckley's book Nearer, My God. He did make one interesting point in passing, which is something along the lines that he had known some people during his life who would have been happier had they known that a divine force was looking out for them. (I can't recall the exact quote as I thought the book itself pretty mediocre and got rid of it as soon as I finished reading it, so I don't have it here to reference the exact quote). But there is an interesting point here, which is that it seems that those of religious conviction are often happier and more contented with their life than others.
Critics might respond that perhaps they should be unhappier and that religion is just a delusion to keep them from confronting how terrible their plight in life is. But that's not the point--the point is that whether they should be unhappy or not, reserach indicates those who are religious in fact are happier than others and my casual observation of people suggests that conclusion seems plausible to me. I'll save my speculations on why that might be for another day (I think the argument looks something like this), and simply note here the empirical point and the plausibility to me of those empirical results.
Again, on this second point, the observation is purely an empirical conclusion, not a normative one, and would be a theory grounded in the type of people who are represented in academia rather than anything inherent in academia itself.
Update:
I should emphasize that I myself am not unhappy to be a law professor. In fact, I love it. And I've also worked in private practice and in the government. So this post is based on generalizations of those experiences.
Related Posts (on one page):
1. Money battles are often status battles. X wants more pay because Y gets that amount (or less).
2. Status battles occur in the business world (as you noted, but didn't seem to realize).
3. Your statement that "Status, unlike income, is an inherently zero-sum game. I can only have more status if you have less--status is all relative and positional." is also true of wealth. Now, of course, wealth is a form of status, but then it's pretty hard to make any neat distinction between money and status.
4. There are very substantial zero sum aspects to money. The economy has a finite size. I can only gain more money up to a point; after that, either someone else has to lose or inflation becomes an issue.
5. I wouldn't be so sure about status-conscious individuals being attracted to academia. Remember how the higher-ups got described in Liar's Poker? "Big swinging dicks." If that isn't status, I have no idea what is.
The arrogance of this is tremendous. Electricians and plumbers and other grunts could never take personal pride in their work, oh no. There are no important status differences between those ignorant brutes, either. They're just stupid lower-class yobs, after all.
My sense is that academia self-selcts for weirdos. Including me, by the way.
But as for the lack of satisfaction, I think your observation is correct. You would THINK that being in the position of a tenured prof would leave one happy. But academia is an odd industry. The only one I can think of where you have LESS responsibility as you climb the ranks. Until you get an endowed chair, at which point you can avoid committe work, most teaching, and so on.
What's the result of having the most senior, best-paid faculty in a department responsible for nothing but their own research? Everyone is miserable. The chairs have so little contact with how the university, industry, and country are run that everything looks easy to them, and they can't figure out WHY other people keep making stupid decisions. They simply have lost touch with the fact that MOST of the world needs to make decisions based on limited time and budgets, competing interests, and so on.
And all the OTHER faculty are p.o.'d because they aren't considered important enough to have chairs.
Amazing! And yet you'll pay $45K/year to send your child here, or a similar university, right?
There are many benefits to working in academia, but the egos are pretty huge, so you have to watch out for that. Kinda weird though... for a group of people that take great pride in their liberal/progressive world view, time and time again I've seen them exhibit the "ME ME ME" attitude, and throw people under the bus if they're in the way of a career.
I was a GS-14 in the government. Only time in my 30+ years as an attorney that I genuinely got to knock off at 5, with no work on weekends. No particular stress at work -- not like your client was going to jail or filing for bankruptcy if you missed something. You always knew what your paycheck would be, and had plenty of benefits.
But by and large the gov't folks were unhappy in a professional sense. Anyone who had a decent amount of time in had already calculated the exact day of his retirement, even if it was 5-10 years away.
Had a friend who was for a time a car salesman. He said you could always spot the government folks, with their depressed looks. The salesmen had a game. Offer the guy the best offer you can, what he could have gotten by hours of haggling, walking out two or three times, etc.. But say the offer is only good here and now. He's never take it, would look the car over, leave, come back days later. And then the salesman would explain he'd said it was a special one-day deal, it's expired now the price is (name number that would begin the haggling).
And you know what we CALL this tendency?
"Collegiality".
Because we're idiots.
Man, I've done everything from the bluest of blue collar jobs to whitest of white collar stuff. Rarely did a person like his job. Or even his life outside of work.
In life, people are pretty discontented. People get "bored," or seem to find anything to do that makes them happy. So they drug themselves with alcohol and "kill time" watching television.
Married guys are unhappy about being married. Single guys are unhappy about not having anything "special." Young women talk about how their clocks are ticking and freak out that they might be spinsters. Older women are unhappy because they are fat. Etc.
This post presumes that professors walk around malcontented in a world where everyone is walking around whistling Dixie. If only that were the case!
Speaking of status.... So only professors are obsessed with it?
Man, status is what people live for. Keeping up with the Joneses.
There's a reason that poor people call themselves "Middle Class," even though they are not.
Unhappiness with life and an obsession with status is part of being a human animal.
Hilariously, professors profess to be above the fray. "We care about ideas."
Um, no. They're apes just like the rest of humanity.
As far as belief in a higher power supposedly making conservatives happier, what evidence do we have that a greater number of faculty members do not share such comforting beliefs? If we suppose they are more liberal, does that mean they are godless? Even if they rejected organized religion, does that mean they are godless in this sense relevant for improving happiness?
It might be worth asking what is meant by happiness, too, if we are going to indulge in speculation on the subject. Do academics simply not seem cheerful and chipper? Are they more often clinically depressed? Are they less likely to engage in virtuous activities?
He typed, on an electric-powered personal computer hooked up to the internet.
And perhaps even THAT shouldn't surprise me, since the only people who have it easier than full-professors are rock stars. And they tend to die of drug-overdoses.
Perhaps there's only so much success that one can handle. Fortunately, I am not on that path-of-discovery.
BUT--I have made myself frustrated and miserable since last May over my book manuscript. See, I could have had it published in a friend's series on a perfectly respectable academic press. But instead I went through a year of waiting, and waiting, and waiting, and revising, and waiting . . . Why? So the imprint on the cover would say "Harvard." My consolation to myself? I honestly don't think I'm a "status-seeker." And in fact U Press Kansas publishes the best stuff in my area on average, and I'd have been thrilled with a Kansas publication.
Except that my dean is one of "those people." He won't hire non-minorities with Big Ten PhD's. Northwestern excepted. You know, those crappy public schools like Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois . . . It "looks better" only hire from elite coastal schools, plus Chicago, N'western, and UVa.
But does anyone REALLY think that Brown, N'western or UVa are in any meaningful sense "better" than Michigan?Except my dean and provost, I mean?
BINGO!
So, being the senior person in an academic department then, is the EXACT opposite of "leadership" which is usually what's expected of people in other lines of work in such positions. Wow, no wonder everyone is miserable and why academia can descend into so much irrelevancy and tripe....
This is, of course, poppycock. Only at a given moment in time, in a snapshot, is the economy of a finite size. The economy is not, as the liberals need you to believe, like a pie to be divided up in slices, and where someone else must always lose if you get too much. I thought this canard had long since disappeared. Monetary and fiscal policy designed to foster investment will always create more "pies" to be divided by more people in ever larger slices. It's really just basic economics.
Not quite. See, e.g., Will Wilkinson's post here (arguing that what predicts self-reported happiness is "a good individual fit with prevailing cultural values").
On the other hand, I don't work many weekends, still earn a respectable salary, and have time during the workday to post here. So it isn't all bad.
In a previous teaching job, the department secretary (who made about $16K/year, and was, of course, poached away by the administrators who ensured that they had all the best administrative support by not allowing academic departments to pay competitive wages) was discussing college professor salaries with some friends at a party. They insisted that starting salaries were $100K/year, and they absolutely refused to believe her when she told them that the most senior 30-year-plus faculty made about $65K/year.
...closest thing to a rock star is in schools with geology departments...
As one commenter has already noted, many academics began their career because of their love for/fascination with their discipline. Most did that by entering grad school at a relatively early age -- likely in their early to mid 20s. At that age, many people have yet to figure out what it is that will make them happy -- that was certainly true of me.
They then devote some 5-7 years, at least, working long hours for very little money, to get the necessary credentials for an academic career. Having got that far, I think many people are reluctant to decide that academia is not really for them. So they enter a brutal job market (I know this varies by discipline, but I've never heard anyone speak very favorably about job prospects in any academic discipline; and I was a historian and that market has pretty much sucked for the last 20 years), and often end up with a job in a place they would never otherwise choose to live, earning shockingly little given what they have invested, teaching a huge course load and facing tremendous pressure to research and publish. The nature of the academy (especially tenure and the current glut of PhDs) means it is extremely hard to make a lateral move, so people are stuck. It's hard to decide that a career in which you have invested so much is actually not a great idea anymore (if it ever was); and also often very hard to know what else you might do at that stage in life. Starting over isn't always that easy or appealing. So maybe we shouldn't be surprised if academics aren't a particularly happy bunch on average.
Then again, I wonder how many non-academics are happily pursuing the same career path that they chose fresh out of undergrad, especially if they were uprooted and forced to move to a place not of their choosing (from which there is little prospect of moving before retirement) in their late 20s?
I was a GS-14 in the government. Only time in my 30+ years as an attorney that I genuinely got to knock off at 5, with no work on weekends. No particular stress at work -- not like your client was going to jail or filing for bankruptcy if you missed something. You always knew what your paycheck would be, and had plenty of benefits.
But by and large the gov't folks were unhappy in a professional sense. Anyone who had a decent amount of time in had already calculated the exact day of his retirement, even if it was 5-10 years away.
So why are they so unhappy? Is it just, as Dave N suggests, that they're unhappy about earning less than their private sector counterparts, or is it something else?
To reference a recently deceased person, like William F. Buckley, with the claim "He did make one interesting point in passing" is not the most felicitous turn of phrase.
I am sorry if I left the impression that pay was the only cause of government employee disaffection. It is not. There are other factors as well that can be bundled into the general category of "lack of appreciation."
People rail against government (and by extension government employees) as if those who work for the state serve no useful purpose and are freeloaders who could not hack it in the "real world."
Academia has much the same problem (my father was a college professor, so I know what I am talking about). particularly in the professions. It is one thing to be a Professor of, say, English, since we all know that there is no other real market for English majors. Law, Engineering, Accounting, and Medical Professors all have people wondering, "Why aren't they out earning real money in the real world?"
Professor Herbert: "The word's out about your new budget cuts Mr. King [the university president] and I'm warning you, touch one penny of my budget and I'm moving to private industry!"
Mr. King: "Private industry? Herbert you're a Latin teacher."
Prof. Herbert: "And a damn fine one - I'd be snapped up in a minute."
As for why people go into academia, what about the obvious explanation: they like the subject matter, enjoy research, and want the various nonpecuniary benefits of the job? Choose your own schedule, write about whatever you want, and you can't be fired (once you have tenure).
And of course after a certain point having more money is mostly about status anyway. Only 100 people can make it onto the Forbes 100.
If you believe the GDP is infinite, I have a house I'd like to sell you.
Of course I meant at a given moment in time. The whole discussion makes no sense otherwise. People only know how happy they are at a given moment. They have no idea how happy or unhappy they'll be in the future.
Do not go into academics unless you have a very strong ego. If you continually need praise and kudos, you are likely to be unhappy in academia.
If you go into academia and truly do not care about status games, be prepared to get fired before tenure. (I barely avoided this.) Academics who desperately care about status cannot tolerate a colleague who does not.
If you go into academia, do not become a committee member without knowing the committee's status. (Yes, committees have status. If you are on a low status committee you lose status, too, even if both you and the committee are making solid contributions.)
And here are two anecdotes:
One of my colleagues was shocked when I told him I did not care what other faculty (including the chairman) thought about me as long as we could work together. He said that getting people to like him was a major goal. He was much more suited to academia than I was.
Two faculty who reported to me were shocked that I did not add my name (as an author) to manuscripts they were submitting to professional journals. When I replied that all I did was review the final draft, they said that my predecessors always considered that enough for authorship. (Medical journals do not consider that sufficient for authorship.) This is part of the publish or perish mode of thinking. Accumulating a list of publications with your name on them is more important than publishing anything worthwhile yourself.
I doubt it was salary. I mean, it's lower by comparison to a partner in a big firm, but what isn't? (My bro-in-law is such a partner, and he works a heck of a lot more than 40 hours a week). Compared to work in a small firm, or solo, government pay is very nice. I just looked up my old slot, GS-14, and it's about $10K a year more than I make, plus benefits worth, oh, twice that. I don't know what it is -- the work can be rather boring, and the paperwork burdens and all that. Or maybe it's just the custom.
I do know that private litigators tend to be quite happy with their jobs, no matter what the pay. Being your own boss, perhaps. I once mentioned to one that I was thinking about trying academia and he responded with concern, "your practice is going to hell?" He was quite serious -- the assumption of a fellow who believes that his career is the best in the best of all possible worlds, hence no one would leave it save in desperation. I doubt you'd see that in academia or in the government.
you clearly don't understand game theory, which is where the term zero sum comes from.
there are not "substantial zero sum ASPECTS" to money. the terminology is nonsensical. a system, economic or any other kind of game (refer to game theory matrixes) either IS zero sum or ISN'T.
the economy is NOT zero sum. period. wealth is not zero sum. period.
an example of a zero sum system would be the futures market (which i trade 5 days a week). the stock market is not zero sum, otoh. options market is zero sum.
and i'm not including commissions in my analysis, because the futures market is zero sum ABSENT commissions. given commissions, it's not zero sum because while no money (overall) is won or lost on the trades (the notional value thereof), it is lost on the commissions, exchange fee, etc. or at least lost to the participants that aren't exchanges.
don't redefine a term.
That in itself sounds like further grounds for resentment.
And was it Thomas Sowell who commented on elitist academics who resented the ignorant masses who failed to show them enough respect and deference? Or am I thinking of somebody else?
It is difficult for a non-academic to understand how the great unseen army of "adjuncts" can exist, people who teach college courses but are not on a tenure track, who are paid considerably less than tenured-track personnel (and usually less than they could get outside academia), who have little job security and often don't even have offices. But they are in academia and that makes them special. They now do a remarkably large amount of the work at American colleges and universities because there is such a large supply of them.
Oh wait, surely nobody could actually enjoy research, right?
Many government jobs are "feast or famine." They are based on such things as the legislative calender, the budget bill process, etc. (depending on where one works). So things can get busy, although nothing compared to the private sector. But things can also get very slow and boring.
There have been many days where I simply had nothing to do. On one hand it's enjoyable. I can read on my work time, I can surf the web and stay on top of politics at the state and national levels, I can take care of some practical matters. But it doesn't really feel like I'm working. I'm being paid for my availability, in case other government workers need me.
And that can leave a person feeling like he's wasting his life. You aren't really accomplishing anything. You don't have any long-term professional goals. You are a cog in the machine, and a necessary one, but you aren't really going in any direction. It feels stagnant. You of course can get promoted to a position of more responsibility, but it's still within the context of a government entity that is never going to look for creativity or ingenuity as necessary attributes.
There's a joke where I work. You can leave within the first few years, or you're a "lifer" and you'll stay until you die. And there's truth to that. The people who decide to stay and make it their career are very good and decent people. But it's a very safe job, and not one that involves much excitement, or challenge, or professional development. So if I can use an offensive term, it's a bit emasculating. You are shielded from the "real world," but you know that you are playing it safe (and are paid accordingly).
I won't look for it now, but there's a famous quote by Teddy Roosevelt about the "man in the arena." Let's just say that if you work for the government, you're not the kind of person he was uplifting as noble and virtuous.
What's not to like.
One possibility for leftism in academia could be that profs know all this stuff--that's why they're profs--but Joe Lunchbucket goes on and lives his life without their permission, doesn't listen to their advice, and seems to be getting along.
So we need the state to enforce the profs' ideas. Joe isn't buying. He's not even paying attention.
My impression is that academia does a lot of education and research, but also spends a significant amount of effort on activities that aren't directly related to those goals, or at least aren't overly effective at advancing them. Hence the unhappiness. And people getting snippy.
The same is true of government.
Of course, if it's true that most people in academia are more concerned about some sort of more or less artificially defined status, that would explain a lot too. That sort of thinking is probably also one of the biggest sources of discontent in the business world.