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Comment by jkot | Hacker News Reader

Great! Problem is not that scientists are often paid less than McDonald's burger flipper.

No! It is social and gender issue! Lets push even more students into this career path.

The low pay for scientists is very definitely related to it not being an accessible path for lower classes.

That doesn't make sense to me. If it were a more accessible path, then you'd have more scientists (supply), the same demand and lower wages.

No--one of the reasons it's not a more accessible path is because it pays so poorly. Science funding doesn't follow a normal supply and demand framework; money isn't sent to scientists by customers in exchange for the benefits they provide, but by hopeful non-profit agencies giving as much as they can without expecting tangible return. There's a set pool of money to draw from (and that pool is drying up, as funding for the NIH et al. decreases) which means you can either have a small number of well-paid scientists or lots of poorly paid ones. There are societal benefits to lots of scientists, so we're all trying to be okay with pure research as a path you can only go into if you don't have large debts to repay.

The way science is currently set up, the only people who can take unpaid "research experience" positions etc. in undergrad that have a huge impact on their career trajectories are people who know the bills are being paid some other way.

You have reached the point. I, myself, in a public University in Brazil, still have concerns about the money I'll have to afford bus tickets. Some students even own a car!, of course most of them have "unpaid" positions because they won't suffer in their social lifes if they aren't paid. Thanks for getting the point.

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 is the case, and it certainly would be somewhat ahistorical for the hard sciences.

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".

You're right that it's possible, in theory, to increase funding to the point that everyone who is capable of and wiling to be a research scientist makes a competitive salary.

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

Thanks for clarifying, I understand your position a lot better. I no longer find it circular, but I still disagree with a lot of your assumptions.

TL;DR: I (and IMO this thread) was speaking of hard sciences, not social sciences: there doesn't seem to be nearly as much of a replicability issue due to people starving for discoveries (there are still process improvements to be made, however). As such, the only bottleneck I've seen evidence of (in the hard sciences) is funding. I do of course think it's possible to fund science _too_ well, I just think that what evidence there is doesn't imply that we're on the point on the curve where excess funding is the problem. The "oversupply" in hard sciences is only relative to the choked-off funding, not to any reality-grounded assessment of the value of further research (and researchers).

I did think the social sciences would come up and considered clarifying that I was speaking exclusively of the hard sciences; I assumed from the conversation about "science careers" that we weren't talking about the majority of the social sciences (I don't think sociology/economics/etc are commonly held to be "science careers").

When you're saying that 1/4 of the economy would be necessary, I'm not sure if you're basing that on the situation where every schoolchild thinks they need to go to grad school? Frankly, I don't think this assumption is reasonable: I don't think the current system even encourages that. Universal undergrad is heavily encouraged, but culturally, grad school still remains very much discretionary. Hell, the last three generations of my family have been thick with advanced degrees on both sides, and I still didn't end up getting one (though it's certainly possible in the future).

I think we've reduced our disagreement to something too intractable for HN, except for this point, which I want to to clarify.

>I'm not sure if you're basing that on the situation where every schoolchild thinks they need to go to grad school? Frankly, I don't think this assumption is reasonable: I don't think the current system even encourages that. Universal undergrad is heavily encouraged, but culturally, grad school still remains very much discretionary.

My point was that grad school "overuse" is tightly coupled to undergrad "overuse" -- colleges are dominated by professors that think highly of post-grad education ("hey, it worked for me!") and will therefore overpromote that as an option. Therefore, overpromotion of college will translate to a saturation of grad school (and jobs with grad-school prerequisites), even if policy "only" encourages undergrad; this is where I think we are today.

> it shows up as the "replication crisis" you may have heard of in the social sciences

The "replication crisis" is not focused in the social sciences; its a name for a problem across the sciences, and is of particularly acute concern in medicine.

Because love of knowledge and learning are weaknesses in a capitalist society. Where there is love, there is a willingness to sacrifice for the love. Where there is a willingness to sacrifice, there is a cost that can be cut.

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.

So there is no possible way that the issues could be related.

It's only that stupid social justice that makes people talk about demographics and socio economics as we all know. There is no other reason to look into it...

But the original article is treating it as separate issue. It does not even acknowledge bad career prospects and low salary as a problem.

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