Out today: A peer-reviewed, data-driven book about how to hack it in academia. Despite not being a modest person, I admit even I felt a bit weird about writing a book like this when JHU approached me. But it provided a chance to use my research from Cracks in the Ivory Tower for a positive end.

BLURB:

What does it really take to succeed in academia?

Do you want to go to graduate school? Then you’re in good company: nearly 80,000 students will begin pursuing a PhD this year alone. But while almost all of new PhD students say they want to work in academia, most are destined for disappointment. The hard truth is that half will quit or fail to get their degree, and most graduates will never find a full-time academic job. 

In Good Work If You Can Get It, Jason Brennan combines personal experience with the latest higher education research to help you understand what graduate school and the academy are really like. This candid, pull-no-punches book answers questions big and small, including

• Should I go to graduate school—and what will I do once I get there?
• How much does a PhD cost—and should I pay for one?
• What kinds of jobs are there after grad school, and who gets them? 
• What happens to the people who never get full-time professorships? 
• What does it take to be productive, to publish continually at a high level? 
• What does it take to teach many classes at once? 
• What does it take to succeed in graduate school? 
• How does “publish or perish” work? 
• How much do professors get paid?
• What do search committees look for, and what turns them off? 
• How do I know which journals and book publishers matter? 
• How do I balance work and life?

This realistic, data-driven look at university teaching and research will make your graduate and postgraduate experience a success. Good Work If You Can Get It is the guidebook anyone considering graduate school, already in grad school, starting as a new professor, or advising graduate students needs. Read it, and you will come away ready to hit the ground running.

REVIEWS:

“Jason Brennan’s book is clear, effective, and captures the process of academic faculty employment exceptionally well. While the lessons Brennan provides aspiring academic faculty may seem stark and unfair, what he says about how this system works is accurate. That is the primary virtue of the book: it tells its readers the way things work without losing its way into a discussion of how they should work. Many of us give variations on this unwelcome advice to our graduate students and colleagues, and now we can just tell them to go read Brennan’s book.”— John V. Lombardi, President Emeritus, University of Florida, author of How Universities Work

“In Good Work If You Can Get It, Jason Brennan tells it like it is. You will get the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. This is the one book to read about trying to become a professor.”— Tyler Cowen, George Mason University, author of Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals

“Each year, thousands of bright and ambitious students begin doctoral programs hoping they will earn PhDs and find rewarding positions at great colleges and universities. Good luck! Brennan offers the advice graduate students need but seldom receive.”— Benjamin Ginsberg, Johns Hopkins University, author of The Fall of the Faculty: The Rise of the All-Administrative University and Why It Matters

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction. Unpleasant Truths about the World’s Best Job
Chapter One. Do You Really Want an Academic Job?
Chapter Two. Success in Graduate School Means Working to Get a Job
Chapter Three. How to Be Productive and Happy
Chapter Four. The Academic Market and Tenure
Conclusion. Exit Options

INTERVIEW

IHE interviews me here.

In a previous post, I questioned why Estlund thinks the state is just. Like Cohen, he argues at length we shouldn’t dumb down the requirements of justice to accommodate common moral failings. But if people were just plain decent, let alone morally perfect, it’s unclear why we would need to create a centralized authority which threatens people with violence to ensure conformity to various rules.

To motivate the need for a state, Estlund gives the example of Prejuria in Democratic Authority:

Ms. Powers, who owned one of the community’s general stores, was seen by at least a dozen people (so they say) sneaking out the back of Faith Friendship’s general store, with which Ms. Powers’s store competes for customers, just before Mrs. Friendship’s store burned to the ground. This struck many people as less than surprising, Ms. Powers being a ruthless businesswoman when she isn’t busy entertaining one man or another. This was a year ago, and Ms. Powers has since found it impossible to live a decent life in Prejuria, since no one will talk to her, do business with her, or intervene when she is verbally or even physically accosted, which often happens if she goes out in public. She reasonably fears leaving her house now, and lives on the meager provisions she makes herself. It so happens that this roughly corresponds to the pun- ishment that is known, in the public rules, to be associated with the crime of which she is accused: extended imprisonment. Everyone real- izes, though, that she is also in danger of being killed by some of the community’s rougher elements. (p. 138)

But, as I said, people in Prejuria are acting in rather rotten ways, indeed, worse than most people I know. Maybe lousy people like them need a state, but that at best shows the state is an excusable response to persistent injustice among rotten people. Why would good people need a state?

How might an ideal theoretic description of Prejuria look?

Ms. Powers, who owned one of the community’s general stores, was seen by at least a dozen people walking out of the back of Faith Friendship’s general store, with which Ms. Powers’s store competes for customers, just before Mrs. Friendship’s store burned to the ground. This struck many people as a total coincidence since Ms. Powers is well-known for being a kind, honorable, and honest businesswoman when she isn’t busy entertaining one man or another. [I don’t see any reason to change her social life in the ideal theoretic example.] This was a year ago, and Ms. Powers has since continued to lead a wonderful life in Prejuria, with everyone continuing to talk to her and do business with her, and with no one ever verbally or physically accosting her or anyone else.

Since everyone in Prejuria has always and everywhere acted rightly all the time, the citizens of Prejuria realized that it was possible, but exceptionally improbable, the Ms. Powers burned down her competing store, or that her “sneaking out the back” showed any evidence of bad behavior. They quickly dismissed this possibility because it was so improbable. Indeed, subsequent investigations showed that she was indeed invited by her competitor over for a friendly discussion, much as two athletes might be friendly to each other despite working for rival teams. Instead, her rival store had a freak electrical problem.

Her rival store owner was of course perfectly conscientious and already had insurance, but if she had somehow faultlessly gone bankrupt, everyone would have chipped in and gotten her back on her feet, all without any need for violent taxation.

As for whether Prejuria would have competing businesses, yes, yes they would.

You would think that if any issue would make people set aside their partisan passions it would be the coronavirus pandemic. Isn’t crystal clear that the proper response to this crisis must rest on science, and only on science? It’s not as if we are debating wealth redistribution, or the competing values of free speech and equality, or some such issue where to an important degree values determine the respective positions.

Yet on the pandemic issue it has become clear that people on the left generally support government-mandated lockdowns, where people on the right generally oppose them. This is mind-boggling. Why would opinions on a matter that should be governed exclusively by science split along ideological lines?

Some have suggested explanations centered around signaling. People adopt a position, not because they believe it, but because they want to signal to others that they are ideologically reliable. I like these explanations, in part because Guido Pincione and I pioneered them in a book written 14 years ago. But here I want to suggest, without completely eschewing these other hypotheses, a reason why this bizarre ideological alignment has occurred.

People on the left do not believe that economic freedoms are important. To them, society owns everything, and we allow voluntary transactions exclusively for efficiency reasons. These folks think that, unlike freedom from torture, freedom of physical integrity, and (less so these days) freedom of speech, the freedom to trade, contract, and invest can be safely disregarded to achieve equality, or dignity, or better health care. To the left, people do not have strong property rights. Society may allow owners to enjoy these rights for the sake of efficiency, but the state is always empowered to cancel or curtail them in the pursuit of collective goals. On the mainstream Rawlsian version of this idea, people don’t even own the fruits of their labor (see also Murphy and Nagel’s influential book).

This means that it is much easier for folks on the left, who have a lifelong commitment to rejecting property and contract rights, to be comfortable with governmental suppression of business during this crisis. They don’t think it is particularly serious to prevent people from buying and selling. (There is even a simple imagery floating around according to which “lives are more important than money.”)

Now, please understand the import of my argument. I’m not saying that people on the left support lockdowns because they hate capitalism. I’m saying that it is easier for them to support these measures because they don’t believe the measures violate fundamental rights, and so the moral hurdle that government action must overcome in a crisis like this one is lower.

And lest I am misunderstood, I’m not saying the lockdown measures are wrong. I don’t know if they are or aren’t. Maybe they are right. I’m just suggesting that the ideological breakdown can perhaps be explained by the prior different attitudes that people have toward property, contract, and capitalist exchanges.

At a recent PPE Society author-meets-critics sessions, I asked whether Estlund’s new book Utopophobia is compatible with his Democratic Authority. Utopophobia argues at length, among other things, that we must not dumb down the requirements of justice to accommodate bad human motivations. Officially, it remains officially agnostic about the content of justice. But it is puzzling why one would think that good people who never act wrongly would need a state. If everyone were willing to contribute voluntarily to public goods, no one ever wanted to violate anyone else’s rights, no one ever wanted to do anything unjust, etc., why would we need a state?

Greg Kavka has a famous argument that even angels would need a state. You can read a systematic, and I think decisive, response to Kavka from Chris Freiman.

In the abstract, Kavka’s argument is that we can imagine morally flawless people who nevertheless have legitimate conflicts of interest, or legitimate moral disagreements, and are willing to fight violently over what to do. We have to imagine, for this argument to work, that they are morally permitted to fight or have such conflicts, and are not morally required to voluntarily, and without coercion, adopt a peaceful resolution procedure. At the same time, we have to imagine that other people are not merely permitted to intervene to stop the by hypothesis permissible and not unjust violence, but further that their best option for doing so is to create a state, rather than using any lesser method of stopping the by hypothesis permissible and not unjust conflict.

It’s a fine needle to thread. It’s one thing to say we can imagine bizarre circumstances where even angels would need a state. (E.g,, Thanos uses the Infinity Gauntlet to make 95% of people believe that everyone else is a sociopathic mass murderer who must be killed immediately or the world will end. Since they are forced into this belief, they are blameless for holding it. They start fighting violently. The remaining 5% can stop them from killing each other only they organize a state.) But under normal circumstances, you’d expect a world full of moral angels/morally perfect people would recognize that others are angelic/perfect, and would therefore have the knowledge they need to overcome any blameless disagreements without violence or the need for centralized coercive mechanisms.

At any rate, in chapter VIII of Democratic Authority, Estlund motivates the need for a state with binding moral authority by describing an anarchic society, Prejuria, which is “tenuously” held together despite lacking a criminal justice system.

Here’s a problem Estlund thinks the state needs to solve:

Ms. Powers, who owned one of the community’s general stores, was seen by at least a dozen people (so they say) sneaking out the back of Faith Friendship’s general store, with which Ms. Powers’s store competes for customers, just before Mrs. Friendship’s store burned to the ground. This struck many people as less than surprising, Ms. Powers being a ruthless businesswoman when she isn’t busy entertaining one man or another. This was a year ago, and Ms. Powers has since found it impossible to live a decent life in Prejuria, since no one will talk to her, do business with her, or intervene when she is verbally or even physically accosted, which often happens if she goes out in public. She reasonably fears leaving her house now, and lives on the meager provisions she makes herself. It so happens that this roughly corresponds to the pun- ishment that is known, in the public rules, to be associated with the crime of which she is accused: extended imprisonment. Everyone real- izes, though, that she is also in danger of being killed by some of the community’s rougher elements. (p. 138)

Now, even with this case, it takes real work to show you need a state to solve the problem. An anarchist doing non-ideal theory would think Estlund doesn’t do a fair job describing anarchic alternatives, even if we suppose people are their normal jerk selves. I won’t get into that here,

The interesting thing is that these people are, well, not angels or morally perfect. They seem to have a general moral suspicion of each other which is unlikely to arise if everyone were morally perfect. Powers is described as poorly behaved. And everyone mistreats her after some suspicious things happen, rather than doing any of the many nice things good people would do instead. So, even if we think Prejuria could use a state, we are asking whether a state would be useful to solve a problem a bunch of bad people face in virtue of their badness, not a problem that good people would face. Most of the discussion in chapter VIII is about the need for a centralized criminal justice system, but presumable a society full of morally perfect people would not need one, period, except under very bizarre cases like the Thanos case above. No termites? No need for exterminators.

Estlund hints at some other cases here and there. But the general challenge is to show that morally perfect people would, under normal rather than bizarre circumstances, face problems so severe that the best way to solve them would be to create an institution with centralized coercive power over all of them. Yet it’s hard to see why coercing good people would be necessary. Good people do the right thing without having to be threatened.

More on this issue later. I’ll re-read chapter IX and later chapters to see if there is something there that saves the case for the state.

SHORT VERSION

JB, 2016: Epistocracy?

Them, 2016: Tetlock proved experts know nothing! There is no reason to defer to experts. We should trust the masses. Also, if we have epistocracy, governments will claim to have special, hidden knowledge so they can push the masses around.

JB 2020: Jesus, the major models calculating the fatality rate of COVID-19 used data with severe selection bias. Seriously, we learned in, like, week 3 of methods classes not to do this kind of thing. When are they going to start using proper statistical methods so we can get a proper estimate? Also, shouldn’t be concerned that, e.g., Neil Ferguson has a long track record of overestimating the dangers of past diseases by many orders of magnitude?

Them, 2020: Shut up! We should all defer to the experts! Policy should be imposed without consulting the people. There is no need to get proper data or present that data to the people. We must trust the epidemiologists, even when we see them making basic errors in stats. Also, governments probably have secret data they aren’t sharing with us.

LONG VERSION

Between 2016-2018, I did a sort of world tour for Against Democracy and its many translations. In that book, I argue there is a distinction between technocracy (having a narrow band of experts engage in mass social engineering) versus the forms of epistocracy I defend (in particular, enlightened preference voting in what is otherwise parliamentary democracy).

I argued voters are not merely ignorant and misinformed about of basic political facts (a fact which nearly everyone grants), but also ignorant or misinformed about the social sciences needed to evaluate those facts. I presented evidence that most voters’ views about political science or economics contradict the low-hanging fruit consensus ideas among political scientists and economists.

I also argued that voters’ economic ignorance has horrible consequences. For instance, democratic antipathy to open borders causes at least $40 trillion a year in losses, and probably more like $100 trillion, losses borne mostly by the extreme poor.

More sophisticated critics would commonly respond by citing Tetlock on experts. Tetlock, they said, proved that experts are very bad at making predictions. Therefore, they said, there is no reason to defer to them. (Nevermind that this is a misreading of Tetlock’s work.)

Oddly, though, as I read through people’s Facebook statuses or have debates with them about the bad data behind the current shutdowns, I find these same people saying that we must defer to the epidemiological experts.

It’s utterly bizarre. When I say, “Here are 3000 highly sophisticated economic studies over a hundred years, performed by economists of all different ideological bents, all arguing X, but the people think not-X,” lots of political scientists and philosophers responded by saying, “Yeah, you can’t trust the so-called experts.” When I say, “Obviously, testing for current infection and mostly/entirely testing people who present themselves as sick introduces a severe selection bias, which means the resulting case fatality rate is not a good estimate of the infection fatality rate,” they say, “Trust the experts. Where’s your degree in epidemiology?”

I’ve been criticizing epidemiologists–including the ones publishing in JAMA, the Lancet, NEJM, etc., and the famous ones who were making apocalyptic predictions on TV last month–for doing what is clearly bad work. My main complaint is, again, that their estimates about the danger of the virus are based on the wrong data (current infections) collected the wrong way (non-random testing of people who present themselves as sick). We all know better than that. You don’t sample on the dependent variable. You don’t sample in ways that suffer from severe selection bias. If you mostly test people who show up saying they are sick, and 3.4% of them die, it doesn’t tell you how many people have the infection, nor does it tell you what percent of people who have the infection will die.

Now, while many economists and others trained in stats have been saying the same thing, it’s surprising how many untrained people say we should instead defer to epidemiologists. You can see some of their arguments on Facebook and others in the comments to previous posts.

1. “Epidemiology is a science and you aren’t trained in it.”

Problem: There are basic methods with statistics that are invariant across all disciplines that use them. For instance, you must avoid selection bias. They are violating these basic methods.

2. “You can’t criticize their model unless you have a better one”

This criticism confuses the critique of their model with the critique of their data. Yes, I think the models we are seeing are poor, because they don’t handle endogeneity or variance well. But my main criticism is that they are using the wrong data collected the wrong way. Good model + bad data => bad science.

As a parody of 1 and 2 together, consider this dialogue:

Physicist: 2+2=5, plus uncontrolled experiment, therefore my theory of physics.

Non-physicist trained in even more math than the physicist: No, 2+2≠5. And your experiment is bad because you lack proper controls. Your paper is bad.

Physicist: Hey, you aren’t a physicist! And you don’t have a better model of physics, do you?

The physicist’s response here is, frankly, stupid. And you, the reader, know better.

You don’t need to have a better model to show someone else’s model sucks. Think of how most seminar papers in the social sciences go. Someone comes in with a model about how, say, the roll out of trains affected agricultural prices. The economists in the audience can pick it apart even if they don’t have a better model. Others can find errors or problems in data collection even if they aren’t trained in the field.

Further, I ask you to go and read the papers on COVID, especially the early ones which were used to justify current policy. These aren’t highly sophisticated papers using the most current difference-in-differences analyses to estimate effects. They are almost entirely crude statistics with nothing else. Most of them just say: We tested 1000 people who came to the hospital saying they had breathing problems, and 35 of them died. Here is the breakdown of death by age and co-morbidities. That kind of info might well be useful for certain purposes, but it would be blatantly and laughably incompetent to use it to estimate what percent of the public will die if they catch the disease.

If this is representative of the field, the field of epidemiology (which is as much a social science as a natural science) is something like 45 years behind econ and 30 years behind poli sci.

Stop defending bad science, people.

3. “Hey, the WHO never said 3.4% of people would die. They were well aware of the limits of their data.”

Lots of gaslighting going on here.

Yes, if you go digging back through the testimony, you see a small number of people saying, “Oh, sure, 3.4% of people diagnosed with COVID died, but we have little to no idea what the infection fatality rate is because of our poor testing procedures. We’ve been testing for the purpose of helping the sick rather than for getting data to estimate the dangers.” But what you mostly see with the Imperial College people, Fauci, and others, is making mass projections based on the crude case fatality rates calculated from bad data.

I can understand shutting down everything temporarily in an abundance of caution. But states are immediately obligated to collect the right kind of data the right way, so we can get a proper estimate of the real dangers and make decisions competently. They haven’t done so. The past month has seen government failure on a mass scale.

4. “You’re just insisting on good data because you’re a libertarian who doesn’t like it when governments push people around in the name of the common good!”

Is that supposed to be a criticism or a compliment?