So I’m getting some pushback about this prior post that compels me to clarify what I wasn’t arguing.
Here’s what people seem to think I meant: Megan McArdle is only a successful journalist because she’s a woman. I don’t think that, didn’t write that, and in fact I thought I had gone out of my way to deny that. It would be both offensive and deeply weird for me to say such a thing, given how virulently sexist politics and journalism are. I would hate to contribute to sexism against conservative and libertarian women, because I know for a fact that they generally and Megan specifically have been the victim of a lot of criticisms that are deeply out-of-bounds. It’s a sad fact that some self-identified progressives have fallen into sexist remarks when criticizing conservative and libertarian women, and Megan has attracted a lot of that negative attention, I’m sorry to say.
In that post, I specifically said that I didn’t begrudge Megan her success, and I tried to make clear in the piece that I wasn’t saying she or other libertarian women are somehow unqualified or illegitimate. I frankly find anybody who can make a living as a writer or journalist to be something of a lucky ducky, and in fact that was my point about Megan’s attitude towards tenure. I specifically mentioned her education and her resume as reasons for her success, which hardly seems like an argument that she’s undeserving. My limited point was that there is a world of libertarian media that is well-funded, beyond its proportional representation in our country, and that libertarianism skews heavily male, which means there are fewer women fighting for the same spots. I could be wrong about the impact of that money! But that’s a belief held by a lot more people than just me. What I should have been clearer about is that I don’t think that McArdle specifically is the beneficiary of some sort of Koch brothers charity plan, and I was far too cute in my headline and spoke too generally in the post itself. For that I apologize. It was a stupid thing to say, and I was wrong to be so loose. The point was never “Megan McArdle owes her career to female libertarian privilege,” or whatever. The point was that people in her position live lives of similar benefits to those that people seeking tenure want to achieve. And of course they do. I am merely troubling the idea that some people are deluded in pursuing these things, or that academia is uniquely exploitative in how it exploits those desires.
To be clear, though: if I thought that McArdle was the recipient of some sort of affirmative action for libertarian women, from my vantage, that wouldn’t be an insult to her at all. I support affirmative action and brute-force efforts to achieve gender parity, precisely because they are necessary in a sexist culture. I get that conservatives and libertarians take it to be offensive to say that someone may be the beneficiary of certain efforts to achieve broader diversity, but I don’t, because I know those groups suffer from structural disadvantage in the broader world. And this actually is why I support market socialism of the kind I advocated in the last post: because human success is such a stew of advantage and disadvantage and privilege and bad luck and good luck and chance and networking. I don’t believe in “deserves” because I think we lack the information to accurately parse it. So there’s no insult in my saying that it’s easier, on balance, to build a career in libertarian media. I’m just identifying some of the factors that allow some people to live the autonomous, mentally-satisfying lives they do. I want to spread that ability more broadly.
Of course, libertarians are going to disagree, and many or most of them believe very much in “deserves,” and I imagine McArdle thinks that the difference between herself and the PhDs who can’t get tenure-track jobs is that she deserves it more. Or maybe just that she’s luckier than they are, and that’s the nature of our economy. Which is just to say that she’s a libertarian, and I’m a lefty.
I’ve said this in a private email to Freddie, but I’ll also say it here: I don’t think that the issue with people on the tenure track is that they don’t deserve tenure track jobs. I’m not trying to take that away from them. I do oppose tenure, but for rather complicated reasons that aren’t much about “Why the hell should they have such a sweet deal?” And in this case, I said nothing about reducing the number of tenure track positions; I simply want schools to reduce the number of applicants they are producing for said positions to something approaching the number of positions. Weed them out in graduate school admissions, rather than encourage them to spend a decade shooting for the brass ring. As long as there is such a huge labor market glut, most professors are going to be hard-pressed to command decent wages or salaries.
I think you might be overlooking the importance of graduate seminars. Universities primarily admit graduate students to fill up grad seminar seats — not to “train them for jobs” (as I think you’re assuming).
Reduce the number of grad students below a minimum threshold necessary for grad seminars to be offered in the first place, and you’ve effectively eliminated the grad seminar from the modern university. And I think that’s a terrible outcome. Grad seminars are places where professors can put their most cutting edge research into the classroom (whereas, with undergrads, professors need to stick to the basics). Thus, the seminars’ existence is integral to the research-teaching model, to faculty research output, and to disciplinary health. All of which policy makers, grant agencies, university presidents, trustees, donors, etc., are likely to prioritize far, far ahead of the needs of grad students on the job market.
I completely agree with that position, but am a bit surprised it’s the one you hold. In that it seems to me more in line with a German-style way of thinking about the labor market, where institutions are responsible for broadly matching supply and demand in different professions, rather than leaving things up to the market. I mean I’m not saying this is a huge contradiction, but I’d think the Hayek assumption would be that individuals have a stronger interest and more fine-tuned local knowledge in determining whether demand exists for a profession they may want to pursue. It definitely seems this model is broken when it comes to certain professions that have traditionally been marked as elite and financially secure but no longer are, including pilot and lawyer as well as English professor. But saying that schools have a responsibility to manage the labor supply rather than simply trying to attract more tuition-paying students seems like it has a lot of implications.
Graduate school is not an employee-employer market in the same way that the normal labor market is. I think that teachers have different, and greater, responsibilities to their students than employers do to employees.
This argument is very strange to me.
There are, indeed, institutions that employ libertarian writers: Reason Magazine, the Cato Institute, and others. There are MANY MORE institutions that specifically employ progressives and conservatives. Among the three, my sense is that opportunities for libertarians in journalism are less numerous than opportunities for conservatives and progressives. If you’re a mercenary young person hoping to make it in journalism thanks to your political beliefs, you’d be pretty dumb to choose libertarian. Granted, you’re better off than if you chose Marxist, but there are much easier paths.
And even if the general point stood, which it doesn’t, Megan McArdle would be an especially poor illustration of it.
While people with libertarian beliefs obviously get a leg up at, say, Reason, last I checked, Megan’s journalistic career has been spent at Bloomberg, The Daily Beast, The Atlantic, and The Economist, not at publications funded by the libertarian movement.
There are, however, two factors that help explain how she got hired at these places: the fact that she built a wildly successful blog with no institutional support; and the fact that she holds a graduate degree and equivalent knowledge on her main beat (business and economics). There is, as well, the fact that she is an engaging enough writer to be followed, for years on end, by a mass audience of non-libertarians, a point that ought to be especially evident to Freddie, who has been reading her writing for years.
All of which places her, like you, among those rare elect who are so privileged as to enjoy a life where they are broadly autonomous in their professional lives and get to work in a profession of intellectual meaning and satisfaction. Which is what grad students want to. Which is my point.
Yeah, I agree with the idea that there are broad similarities between aspiring journalists and aspiring academics. And I wish both groups all the best!
But I think Megan’s point is not that grad students are wrong for wanting that. Rather I believe she’s saying that R1 institutions have the ability to push the moment of disappointment earlier in the careers of would-be professors, which would be better for those that don’t make the cut.
Setting McArdle’s job history aside, it seems pretty clear that when you talk about total job opportunities you are misunderstanding the argument that is being made here. If I use numbers from the last presidential elections, the comparison between Democrats/Republicans to Libertarians is about 50 to 1 each. As a rough heuristic, this sounds about right, although of course not all libertarians vote for the Libertarian candidate, so if you have other numbers you want to use go for it. What Freddie appears to me to be arguing is that the ratio of jobs for libertarians in journalism and policy think tanks does not match this ratio. In reality it may be 25 to 1 in starting jobs for progressives versus libertarians. But the point is, even though there are twenty-five times as many progressive jobs than libertarian jobs, the libertarians still have better odds because there are twice as many jobs as you would expect given overall numbers. This is why talking about total jobs, as you do, is missing the point. Now, this may not actually be the case. Freddie is making an argument based on what feels right, and he’s not even a part of that world.
I was scratching my head to think up a useful point of comparison when I remembered a recent post on Brian Leiter’s blog about hiring in history departments. There are clearly way more jobs in North American history than any other area, but in spite of that this is actually where competition is most brutal. In contrast, there are fewer positions but much less competition in every other area, and in Asian history there actually aren’t enough people to meet demand. If you just looked at the total number of positions, you would be misled into thinking that your best job prospects were in North American history, when in reality you would be much better served by pursuing Asian or African topics (although the difficulties of having to learn multiple new languages certainly help keep those numbers low). http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2014/01/jobs-for-history-phds-down-7-this-year-after-two-years-of-increases.html