Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Many of my cultural heroes were ignored by academia

Ignored, or the jobs just weren't there?

A department head once told me that she couldn't hire any new tenure-track faculty. Turnover at the school is so rare, and when a position does open up, there are literally hundreds of highly qualified applicants. It's been that way for decades, particularly in the humanities and arts.

She noted that among the existing faculty were several tenured professors who had been hired in the previous century when their respective areas of study were hot. Even though their expertise was outdated and students weren't signing up for their classes, they were still on the books until they voluntarily retired ... or died.

Fresh Air had a great interview with Glass in which he talked about his career and the various jobs he had to take as he developed his music. He was driving a cab in NYC in the 70s and he said it was very dangerous. It's the top interview in this list:

https://freshairarchive.org/guests/philip-glass

...they are all very poor people who follow as a trade, what other people pursue as a pastime.

From The Wealth of Nations:

http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN4.html#I.10.6

Hunting and fishing, the most important employments of mankind in the rude state of society, become in its advanced state their most agreeable amusements, and they pursue for pleasure what they once followed from necessity. In the advanced state of society, therefore, they are all very poor people who follow as a trade, what other people pursue as a pastime. Fishermen have been so since the time of Theocritus. A poacher is every-where a very poor man in Great Britain. In countries where the rigour of the law suffers no poachers, the licensed hunter is not in a much better condition. The natural taste for those employments makes more people follow them than can live comfortably by them, and the produce of their labour, in proportion to its quantity, comes always too cheap to market to afford any thing but the most scanty subsistence to the labourers.

There are a lot of jobs in teaching and most are not tenured. And that's probably true of many disciplines, not just art. Many are not even full time. So... depending what you are looking for, it may not be a comfortable situation - but it might be good enough as a day job. At least if teaching art is within your tolerance for a "not toxic" job... From an economics perspective, the fact that plenty of people teach art without tenure may have something to do with why so little tenure is available.

The rise of social media and 'smart culture' has led to huge, sudden interest over the past decade in all sorts of niche or esoteric subjects. Talented people are making a good living at math videos, TikTok tutoring, playing instruments on TikTok, reaction videos, food videos, etc. In the '90s, if you were a 'philosophy buff' your options were limited to academia. Now there is a devoted, captive audience for practically anything you can think of.

In the art world, I'm convinced ignored is correct. Academics often have very different goals and produce very different art than those outside academia.

Also tenure Glass would have been just different than blue collar Glass we had.

Yeah, I think a lot of people miss that these jobs opened up when the population was growing much faster due to the baby boom, plus people are living longer. Things have changed since the 1950s-80s.

Changing quickly now as the prior generation sat still collecting rent as long as possible, refusing to evolve themselves, and kept the next generation away from opportunities to evolve.

Teachers who just take public school jobs rather than start local learning programs and nurses who idle in hospitals rather than start some in-home nursing service for their community, academics whose careers stalled due to progress sit there reliving the same old routine blocking newcomers from moving through the pipeline

Whole lot of ossified minds in industry who need to get over coddling some sacrosanct story and identity and move along

but people have more income now - surely working for uber or lyft today is the equivalent of driving a cab then?

Absolutely not. Cost of living increases and the like. Consider, back then single income households were the norm because you could absolutely afford a house, car in the driveway, and raise a couple kids on a single blue collar income. Hell, in the late 90s you could make rent on a studio apartment in a single weekend delivering pizza if tips were decent.

I'm talking about income - you're talking about expenses. Sure, the balance between the two matters, but they're not the same thing!

I couldn't agree more. One is a number on your pay stub the other is a measure of what that actually means. In 1998 I could do more on the $8hr I was earning at the time than you could earning 3 times as much today.

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