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"The bottom line here is simple. Both capitalists and workers have cause for complaint. Capitalists have lost pricing power - the degree of monopoly has fallen - which has tended to depress the profit share. But this has not benefited workers because instead the "wedges" of other incomes and higher imports have depressed their share. "
"Philosophically, the Brooks and Rajan essays are interesting for the way they awkwardly combine an old-fashioned style of conservatism (the poor will always be with us, accept your lot) with a more modern form of inclusive neoliberalism (accept deregulation, and you too can be rich!) By itself, the first style of argument is simply intolerable to modern sensibilities, but the crisis has rendered the second increasingly implausible. Together, however, the two arguments add up to nonsense.
The simplest response is that self-styled critics of “structural” economic problems are not being structural enough. The existence of a hyper-polarized wage structure is not a fact of nature but is itself a structural problem, and one that has been facilitated by specific policy choices. What we need is not “human capital” but a shift away from protecting rentiers and toward strengthening the bargaining position of labor."
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There is an odd dissonance in these accounts, however, one that’s more obvious in Rajan’s version than in Brooks’. First, we are told that the stagnation of wages and the disappearance of jobs is an unchangeable structural fact: globalization and technology dictate that the demand for labor will be split between a handful of high-skill, “superstar” jobs and a mass of menial, poverty-wage service work. Yet we are also told that we face a deficit of “human capital”, implying that adequate education is all that anyone needs to escape the trap of unemployment or low wages.
"Just as American manufacturing turned belly-up in the face of the out-sourcing of labor in the globalized market in the 1990s, higher ed is now poised to do exactly the same thing with the professoriate.
Distance learning, the fastest growing segment of the higher education market, will make it possible for a Ph.D. in New Delhi to teach that big section of Chemistry 100 to students from all over the world. And in New Delhi, $4,000 will probably seem like pretty good money."
"Mentoring in the professional neoliberal workplace of is one of those classic words that can be used to invoke or simulate institutional benevolence when there is actually a waning of reciprocity in the employment relation. "
"The Pseudo-Striving Hypothesis
It’s significantly more pleasant to pursue a goal with a plan entirely of our own construction, then to use a plan based on a systematic study of what actually works. The former allows us to pseudo-strive, experiencing the fulfillment of busyness and complex planning while avoiding any of the uncomfortable, deliberate, often harsh difficulties that populate plans of the latter type."
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For the aspiring grad student, seeking research ideas that fall comfortably within the scope of what you already know how to do, and then trying to convince other people that your work is important, is pseudo-striving. Reflecting on my experience, I notice now that academia is much more likely to reward the strategy of spending the 12 – 24 months of deliberate practice necessary to master an important emerging field. This is really hard. But those who persist end up doing work with impact.
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- Specific writing projects with deadlines for completion, submission, and revision
- Graduate program deadlines for exams, proposals, and defense
- Major conferences with deadlines for submission of abstracts and proposals
- Job market deadlines
- Major funding deadlines, including both small grants to support short research trips, and large grants to fund dissertation fieldwork.
- Networking goals, including reminders to get in touch with certain individuals related to emerging new research or writing projects
- Teaching dates
- Submission dates for awards and honors
Things that were on it included:
"Astrologists didn't discover the cosmic microwave background radiation...ufologists didn't discover extrasolar planets...cryptozoologists didn't find these insects...just a friendly reminder of who's doing all the damn work."
"This study offers an important policy lesson. Training more Ph.D.s in some targeted areas might fail to improve research output in these areas. In this instance, supply-side economics fails. It might be preferable to create new research jobs instead and attract the Ph.D.s with better salaries."
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It’s the same sentiment that makes you dismiss the small successes of people around you, as you are busy striving to preserve or revive Fundamental Truths.
Because you really did have a good idea, once. You had the best intentions in the world, but after a few years you got tired of being the lone voice in the wilderness. And now these newcomers, these mundane folk who say they’ve heard something that sounds an awful lot like what you were trying to say back when you still cared?
Well, they’re too late, as far as you’re concerned. It’s not the same, they’re missing the point, they’re diluting your crystalline ideas.
But I am reminded: It’s never the same.
Go visit somebody new. Things are different somewhere else. And when you get back home, maybe things will be different there, too. Especially if you feel strongly that a revolution is called for: perhaps there is one going on there, or will be here when you get back.
Or maybe it already came and went, and you just missed its threads out there on the face of the world. Maybe it’s been happening, here and there, all along.
A point I've argued many times but usually fail to convince.
"Most American workers labor under the auspices of employment-at-will, which allows employers to hire, fire and promote for good reasons, bad reasons, or no reason at all. "
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As academic Corey Robin notes in his book, Fear: The History of a Political Idea, employers have wantonly exercised this power, and the judiciary has repeatedly upheld this despotic state of affairs. The courts have backed employers' right to fire their workers for such non-work related reasons as “carrying on extramarital affairs; participating in group sex at home; having children out of wedlock; smoking on the job; wearing, in the case of off-duty male police officers, an earring; and carrying on relationships and friendships with coworkers or employees of a competitor.”
"However, from talking to numerous faculty members and academics from a variety of institutions, it has become clear to me that a central problem remains: none of these extra-curricular activities matter when a job search committee determines which graduate student to invite for an interview, and they do not matter for tenure. These facts make it subtly clear that, as a whole, the modern American academy expresses a keen indifference toward the relationship between academic knowledge and the public interest/public good"
"If we are going to be serious about helping the academic humanities survive into the 21st century, we need to make the dissertation (a little) less rigorous, but make graduate schools harder to get into, by cutting the number of slots, even of entire departments. That way, only the very best students (ideally) will pursue PhDs, but those who do will likely finish and may actually have tenure-track jobs awaiting them. The most committed and most talented students will get a greater proportion of the financial and faculty support universities can provide. Fewer students will be around to teach, but since there will be fewer programs, they will congregate around top faculty, creating very high level intellectual communities. Yes, it’s elitist and “meritocratic,” insofar as any of this is meritocratic and not purely subjective (another debate altogether). But I can’t think of any other good solution."
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