Are there too many of us?
By "us" I mean graduate students in political theory. Here's your "gloomy reading of the week" link, to an article arguing that there is a "glut" of PhDs, especially in disciplines which produce graduates without many skills marketable to industry (reading ancient Greek, writing papers on Hegel, you get the picture). (More discussion after the break).
Of course, taking our cue from Plato (self-promoting link(PDF) to my reading of the section on measure), to say that there is "too much" of anything one needs to ask: too much for what?
The economist's answer to that question says: too much (or too many) at some price X for the current structure of desires of society. Given that price, there are unsold products, or unemployment or underemployment, or the equivalent term in other markets. So, an economist might say that there are too many PhD students for the number of positions available at the salaries currently paid and given the kind of investment it takes to get a PhD, since many PhDs end up unemployed or underemployed.
There is something to that. As those of us who are currently in the labor market can attest, the number of people applying to even obscure positions is huge. One position I applied to had 400 applications; another had 630 (needless to say, it is very hard to reach "rational" decisions when choosing the "best" candidate out of 630). These are numbers one would expect to find for unskilled labor, not for positions requiring highly specialized knowledge that requires lots of time and money (in the form of foregone income opportunities) to attain. We may all eventually find a position (though perhaps not at the level we wanted to, and perhaps at a much lower income than we expected to), but it certainly does not seem a very "rational" economic decision on our part to spend so much time and energy preparing to become professors.
True, most of us did not go to graduate school for the money - we did it to follow our intellectual passions, or because we had nothing else to do, or whatever; but the economic point would still hold, and the article I linked to details some of possible perverse incentives that universities have to train as many PhD students as they can. (Why, exactly, did I go into political theory? Sometimes I can't remember).
But the economist's viewpoint is not the only possible one. Are there too many students of political theory from another point of view? Does society need - as a matter of some conception of he common good - the number of political theorists-in-training that currently exist? E.g., from the point of view of the production of knowledge, or of teaching young people? Can one justify not one's own work, but the work of a group of heterogeneous individuals in anything other than economic terms? (The market values your work at X).
[Update: I've changed this post a bit after putting it up, February 5, 2006]
posted by Xavier Marquez @ 12:53 PM
2 comments
2 Comments:
You make a very good point about work generally sucking, and the fact that there are a number of good things about professorial jobs. But they are still a gamble, and they do have a number of trade-offs: you get more security and flexible schedules after tenure for somewhat less money than comparably educated people; more self-direction in terms of what you do every day and what interests you pursue but often less sense of measurable accomplishment (it's not like we are inventing stuff that works, or that we know very well how our blind efforts in the classroom affect our students). Given these tradeoffs, it might still be possible to make a case for the irrationality of the gamble (with the possible downside of ending in community college or adjunct hell), though it is certainly not clear cut.
I think your point about theory PhDs becoming future professors and taxpayers is still framed in purely economic terms, and as such open to the objection that the market for PhDs is distorted, i.e., not rationally allocating scarce resources. Thus: too many PhDs earning low wages instead of other more productive (in a purely economic sense) members of society.
But is there a political-theoretical justification for talking about distributions of skills and vocations in society as being out of whack, so to speak?
I suppose classical liberal theory would say no: the only possible justifications for talking about distributions of skills are economic, since as long as people are pursuing morally permissible career paths there is no politically relevant consideration that would allow us to force them to choose some career paths over others. (Though perhaps the offer of incentives to choose one career path over another is not out of bounds, as, e.g., when the US government decides that it needs more arabic translators and thus offers scholarships and other incentives to recruit them).
At the other extreme, you have something like Plato's conception of the order of forms of knowledge in the city, where the Statesman decides the proper mixture of forms of knowledge that are allowable to pursue. Here the idea is that each skill or form of knowledge contributes one part to the care of human beings, and that they must be coordinated properly (through knowledge, not an invisible hand) to achieve their purpose.
I'm not saying Plato is right and classical liberal theory is wrong or vice-versa - but these two positions seem to me to represent two extremes. I wondered in my original question, though, whether there are political-theoretical or moral or some other type of reasons to prefer some specific distribution of PhD candidates in political theory over some other distribution.
I don't know whether this is a meaningful question in the end; but I think that any theoretical position which has a conception of a common good attainable through skilled human activities would seem to need to cope with it...
As for 2.a) I suppose the answer depends on finding comparable alternative possibilities. If it turns out that the satisfaction I get from learning/teaching political theory is as high as the satisfaction I would have gotten from choosing any other available path (given my situation etc.), then one could say that the personal satisfaction justification trumps the economic ones. But I'm not sure that's always the case, especially if my choosing to study political theory is partly determined by a structure of incentives that has too many open spots for such study.
To 2.b) I think the question is less about justice (nobody may be doing anything unjust and we would still end up with the same distribution of PhD candidates) than about goodness (is society better with fewer/more theory students in some suitable non-economic sense). Such a distribution would not necessarily be static (some situations might call for more, some for less), and the economist would say that any proper distribution would be regulated by the market. But I find this answer unsatisfactory.
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