What is the basis for these strange claims, how is it priviliged if my University proffesor makes less than some of his graduates with 3 years of experience?
Whu do you think they contribute less, did physicists start slacking? What statistics demonstrates this?
The World Wide Web on which you posted your comment was invented at a particle physics lab 33 years ago.
For example: the military industrial complex commands huge budgets despite having produced nothing of value for the last 50 years. It commands these huge budgets because generals, senators, and admirals have societal privilege. When a general, senator, and CEO say that society should write a check for billions of euros to build the F-35 or blow up some children, society does it. That is societal privilege.
I think some Ukrainians using javelin anti tank missiles would like to have a word with you…
The LHC cost €7.5 billion, and that's the largest particle physics project ever. I have to admit that's noticeably more than I have in my pocket at the moment, so in a sense it's "a huge budget", but it's only slightly more than the US$5.6 billion spent on the Petronas Towers, which is a single office building in Kuala Lumpur. Well, two office buildings.
You know what has a huger budget? Sweet potatoes. The yearly sweet potato market is US$43 billion. That's enough to build almost six Large Hadron Colliders per year.
So by that measure particle physicists have about 1% of the societal privilege that sweet potatoes do.
(And that despite CERN, where the LHC is, having invented the WWW.)
I mean I know that from inside NASA or Google it looks like Ph.D.s run the world and professors wield godlike power. But actually, in the context of world society, academia has a fairly small role.
Particle physicists didn't raise the money for the LHC by selling a product on the open market, they raised by lying to politicians, who in turn extracted the money from taxpayers. If someone without societal privilege (like Anna Sorokin for example) had done that they would be put in jail. Instead the physicists got tenure despite having delivered essentially nothing of value. That is societal privilege.
Coca-Cola makes US$37 billion a year (almost five LHCs, thus 50 times the average annual budget during the LHC's construction) by making people obese with flavored sugar water. Some of this involves lying, but much of it is just emotional manipulation; vanishingly few of its customers receive anything of value. So far none of its executives have been imprisoned as a result.
(Petronas Towers wasn't funded by voluntary contributions, either. Petronas has a state monopoly on oil and gas extraction.)
I agree that it would be better to fund basic research like the LHC from voluntary contributions. (I think dominant assurance contracts are a promising attack on that problem, but I don't know if they will succeed.) But if you take traditional academia and taxation as a package deal, I think most people would prefer to live in a world with the 15 recent enormous contributions to society by traditional academia I listed in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31275875, including modern agriculture, solar energy, and Linux, than in a society without them and without taxation.
These are public goods, and it's a well-known result in economics that markets underprovide public goods; the equilibrium result is that they almost don't provide them at all.
Even within the realm of taxation, academic research is hardly the hot spot. Most countries spend almost no tax money on academia. Even in the US, whose federal budget is US$6600B, NIH gets US$42B (0.7%), Pell grants get US$35B (0.5%), NASA gets US$23B (0.5%), NSF gets US$8.3 billion (0.1%, which includes basically the entire particle physics budget), and DARPA gets US$3.4B (0.05%). If you wanted to reduce the US tax burden, most taxpayers wouldn't even notice if you reduced the federal budget by this 1.9%. The rest of the federal budget is literally fifty times as big.
The claims about confirming or ruling out supersymmetry.
See https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96VECuUXbEs particularly starting at the 6:20 mark (but the whole thing is well worth watching).
Are we gonna be moving goalposts all day? First it was not the pay, you said it was how much inflience they have over society, and that influence was measured in a dollar amount. Now it's the 'lying' and 'collective belief'. What's next, the holy spirit graces them with better afterlife?
> What matters is that the sweet potato market is a market.. choose to buy sweet potatoes of their own free will
Who said it matters? I voted of my own free will, and my vote funded the LHC. Is my free will in the form of voting less legitimate than my free will the form of money?
In the same post you are saying that privilidge isn't about money, but you are also implying that you have no free will without money?
What about markets where no person ever bought anything of their own free will, all corporation to corporations markets? For example there is a market for planet destroying coal, for clothes and rare-earth minerals produced with slave labour, etc. Do those industries have more privilidge than academia does?
Fine, let's compare it to something that isn't a market -> recommendations of the Doctors and the CDC, or the Catholic Church, or the spending on the road network, or the military. All of them have bigger budgets. There is no way that this logic works.
This entire series of posts is clearly clutching at straws. Real privilidge is measurable - Men used to make more money for the same job, black people were less likely to get the job, they died younger, etc.
Yes, because your vote spent other people's money, not your own.
> This entire series of posts is clearly clutching at straws. Real privilege is measurable - Men used to make more money for the same job, black people were less likely to get the job, they died younger, etc.
College graduates make more money for the same job, are more likely to get the job, and they die older. For college professors this is even more true, at least if we're talking about former professors going into industry in the first two cases.
So clearly by your definition traditional academia does have significant privilege. Where I differ from Ron is that I think it's well-earned and not very large in absolute terms.
It's our money, I pay taxes too, significantly more than average. So you don't believe in democracy?
If half the population has net worth of rougly zero, does that part of the population not have legitimate free will?
In such a society, what stops the half that is wealthy from becoming exploitative towards the poor, putting in place policies that make sure the poor stay poor. What if they take student loans furhter and make the kids start their life with a loan for mandatory schooling, from primacy school onwards. Making real estate so expensive that the only way majority can have housing is for it to be provided by the company in company towns, and if you quit your job you loose roof over your head. And making healthcare so expensive that it can also be only provided by your employer, and if you loose your job with a chronic health condition you are basically sentenced to die. oh, wait, we have already done that bit.
What stops the wealthy part from turning it into Feudalism version 2 - there are lords, there are some 'free merchants' like white collar proffeshional, and then there are the serfs?
No, not really. It's better at preventing the worst harms of government than the alternatives that have so far been tried, such as feudalism ("aristocracy"), dictatorship, and especially colonialism, but democracy still regularly perpetrates atrocities and steals from the poor to enrich the rich. Hopefully we can find a better form of social organization soon, one that doesn't offer the ruthless and ambitious quite so much leeway to enrich themselves by harming others.
I, too, condemn the strawman the rest of your comment rightly condemns, which as far as I know consists of policies that nobody has ever advocated.
Within the broad class of democratic societies, those that have stronger protection for private property and tighter limits on government power are the ones that are best at protecting the poor from the depredations of the rich and otherwise privileged.
Sometimes it has been said that democracy consists of two wolves and a sheep voting on what to have for dinner, but Trump's election demonstrates the truth is even worse: they apparently voted to eat library paste and boiled leather.
Surely you wouldn't expect anyone to openly advocate 'let's make housing unaffordable', and yet we are well on our way to making it unaffordable.
Also no-one ever advocated 'let's allow Russian oligarhs to buy UK realestate with blood money, anonymously, inflate real estate prices and introduce strong libel laws to protect them' and yet that's exactly what happened, and even the financial times got sued multiple times for reporting on the issue.
https://www.principiadiscordia.com/book/45.php
(And if not, well, that's the trouble with democracy...)
Hear hear.
Got any suggestions?
All this stuff is, sociologically speaking, "basic research". When you start out on basic research you don't know what the results will be.
(But isn't it unethical to do experiments on humans? No, whatever you do in the world without knowing the full consequences amounts to "experiments on humans", and the question is whether you do it well or badly.)
By the way, would you mind making an effort to answer my comment at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31276333?
> Societal privilege is not measured in terms of the net income of the people who hold the privilege, it is measured in the influence those people have over the workings of society.
"The dollar amount is not what matters" seems to me to be entirely consistent with that.
Other proffeshions that command huge budgets include Architects and bricklayers - we spend 2 trillion on construction in a single year, that's more than all spending on Physics for all of recording history combined. Or doctors, city planners, bankers, etc.
I don't know what beef you have with themm but at least run this mental experiment: Imagine a girl brings her boyfriend over for dinner, and he tells them her parents he a physicist working on the most cutting edge research. Is their first throught going to be 'oh, that's great, if they get married she will live a life of privilidge?'. If the parents had to advise between him and a heart surgeon, or a senior manager at a bank, a succefull lawyer, a developer at google - what do you think it will be?
Bottomn line is this: when pressed on privilidge, you can't come up with anything measurable where physicists will be even be in the top 10, because such a metric does not exist. it's just some impression you formed that you are trying to justify.
Societal privilege manifests itself in all sorts of ways both big and small, but the ultimate measure of it is in the difference between how people are treated for doing the exact same thing depending on whether they have it or not.
It's like what we did in the dark ages, but in reverse?
Given how the academic careers are structured, I do think "privilege" is a very bad word to use here. It's no more of a privilege than working most of your time documenting why you should get a promotion on Google like people were discussing yesterday. But it's one of the many very real problems academia has nowadays.
There are many careers that produce not just zero, but negative value to society, and academia is nowhere near the top of that list.
Also, have you seen what professors have to fill out to get a grant to fund their research?
I'm not aware of almost anyone except for academics that prioritize maximizing societal good. I guess in addition to teachers, firefighters and librarians as well.
Certainly I doubt anyone on this board does that.
Teachers so teach, firefighters do fight fires when those appear, and librarians do organize books. They don't get to not pay attention to those tasks and still be successful.
The comment was "worry about bringing the most value to society". And you think that's what pretty much anyone does? Finance, ad-tech, real-estate flippers, and numerous others may not even add any value. Others are all about internalizing profit and externalizing costs. At the very least, "bringing value so society" is a tertiary goal for most people.
I choose a few people who could be making more doing something else. I'm sure, some people who work at nonprofits could also make more in a different field. But those are the only people I've seen worry about bringing value to society.
Know anyone who got an advertised rate on a mortgage to buy a freshly renovated home?
The fun fact about valuable things is that people often pay for them with money. Where money changes hands there's value changing hands.
No. I know people who got an advertised rate to buy a non-recently-renovated home (including one who decided to take a year-ish sabbatical to totally rebuild and repair the house herself as a life-goal). Others either didn't renovate the old style or renovated it the way they wanted.
I take that back. I do know at least one person who bought a freshly renovated home out of foreclosure auction. But that was because of the price, not the renovations.
But again, you're conflating "add any value" to "worry about adding the most value to society"
Good point.
"The most" implies that there's some objective total ordering. Subjectively, I think people are guided by their subjectively personal notions of "adding value" and "society".
For example, if you looked at my behavior from the outside, I am not adding the most value to society in your metric. But I swear that I am a rational, optimizing agent in my own goofy metric. :)
There are 4,000 colleges and universities in the US. At the VAST majority of those institutions -- perhaps 80% -- professors spend 40 hours per week teaching courses. They teach 3 university courses per semester with 40-400 students per course, with the lower enrollment courses requiring a pretty heavy lift per student (lots of office hours, labor-intensive grading of proofs or long papers or large programs, etc). That's 40 hours of work, sometimes more.
Hacker news massively over-estimates the number of "elite R1 faculty" and under-estimates the number of faculty who are essentially just college teachers.
Tenure and pensions have significant off-book value. There is also social capital to consider
My wife is a professor. I can assure you that her pension options were not good.
Because there are other metrics for respect (and privilege) than simply the salary one makes.
For example: the "privilege" of being able to, at least in theory, devote one's skills and brain power to a higher purpose (curing cancer, say). Or at least to what one actually wants to do. Rather than the basically random stuff (and sometimes dark patterns) that most industrial types have to devote their intellectual resources to.
This wishishy-washy stuff about purpose, maybe you have it all wrong? Maybe the people who can make a career out of damaging mental health of kids through dark patterns are the real priviliged group.
If it’s the same for their graduates but they make 3x, then what forces are keeping them there?
For some it’s idealism - but few tenured professors are idealists in my experience.
Second, most people aren't rational economic actors and even those who are have a myriad of objective functions.
Some common reasons people stay when they could get much higher paying and lower stress jobs:
1. Immigration.
2. Work life balance. Not unique to academia, btw. I know ex-FAANG SWEs who make $70K/yr because they can get the job done in one or two days a week from a van and want to spend most of their life in the mountains.
3. Immigration.
4. Some people actually enjoy teaching and view it as a life calling.
5. Immigration.
6. Ageism. A 50 year old who spent 20 years in academia is going to have a hard time getting back into industry.
Also, the multiple is closer to 10x for strong faculty candidates if we're talking about teaching-focused roles. A lower-tier college/university (non phd granting) will offer 60K - 80K for a full-time faculty position. A PhD with 5-10 years of industry experience will make >500K if they are maximizing for income.
Also gives you access to advisory positions (which pay well, and often in equity), and advantage to recruit very talented people into your own startup.
Others may enjoy the privilege of ending up on administrative committees, adding to their job security (eg, post retirement).
Although this is a specific problem with degree mills not representative of all schools.
Eh I’ve seen idiots with a 4 year degree from a state school.
The singling out of state school graduates in that missive did seem rather strange (and contrary to observation).
If the privilidge was in academia, they would have stayed where the privilidge is
Not the OP, but the term "Privileged" has many meanings. FWIW, "monetary compensation" would not necessarily be in the top 3 my mind jumps to.
Some thoughts:
* There's the privilege of job security
* Related privilege of potentially higher relative freedom of actions or higher flexibility, work life balance, etc
* There's societal privilege and respect given to the profession (heck, they even share a root word:)
But I imagine "Privileged role in society" was meant more broadly in that in many fields/situations, or for many people, academia/professors/university are seen as guardians / best source of facts / models / truth / knowledge. And that is a tremendously privileged role, with tremendous influence which I believe OP indicates is no longer deserved or earned.