I write little academic papers for a living as a professor. I think this is good advice on how to write like cormac mccarthy. More important is to pick an academic writer whose journal articles you love and copy them. One of my favorites is Paul Krugman. He’s not in my field but apparently he’s good enough that people want to read him. He uses lots of semicolons and punctuation.
I understand where this advice is coming from, though. Lots of academics are truly horrible writers and believe complication itself makes their writing erudite.
Me too. I think that because of the meta programming capabilities we’re going to see a lot more development in that direction. Recently I started using Turing.jl, which uses a sort of declarative syntax that was easy to write and understand.
Do you have a writeup of the traffic simulation rules that you're using? I peeked in the code and saw the intelligent driver model is being used for acceleration. I suppose you also have a lane-changing model and such, too.
Your architecture could be very useful in teaching.
Ah, I'd love to hear more about this! Getting traffic right is much tougher than we appreciated at first.
Disclaimer: Creator & lead developer of SimAirport.
I suppose we just did it "wrong" to begin with, and have since been stuck with the wrong graph / haven't put the time into fixing it yet -- but would be curious to hear high-level of how you're doing it.
Our issues are primarily that we did lanes as graph nodes instead of "node capacity" so our pathfinding prescribes precisely which lane to use; when stuck in traffic we can't intelligently find our way around it without pathfinding again, but then 'quality' ends up being correlated to how often we pathfind with node-occupancy info, which obviously is a poor (and poorly performing) solution.
Would love to hear your approach or if you'd be interested in talking shop at all, email is in profile! :)
First time I saw SimAirport, looks wonderfully antsy!
I'd love to discuss traffic with you on the Citybound subreddit, since I think there might be other people interested in such implementation details :)
Many universities in major urban areas have a school of housing and community development. They study planning, policy, design, economics, and other related disciplines.
Once trained with how to create new models in your system, academics could simulate the impact of ideas they are developing in research.
I just thought it might be nice if you did a breakdown of the physics of traffic and maybe how you coded that part.
As for teaching, I think it could be used to teach about like signal timing etc in a fun way.
I’m a professor. I have a few thoughts about this.
First, the grad student/professor relationship is inherently asymmetrical, much more so than most employer/employee relationships. The degree has to last years or else you get nothing, and there are no hard and fast terms of the relationship like there is in many jobs. The professors recommendation might be the most important thing you get, and that is always running in the background. So many professors treat their students like robots.
Second, professors are essentially super students. We became professors because we have extreme standards. Your engineering manager became a manager because he was an engineer and got promoted, but having a professor as a boss is like if a famous open source developer was your boss. Nothing about becoming a professor selects for kindness or empathy, unlike a manager at an ordinary company who might be trained and evaluated—-especially in a large company—-on the happiness of his workers. So a lot of professors have essentially obsessive attitudes and no empathy. Add to this the fact that many students are escaping countries where they have little future. For example, the past few years, the Iranian economic crisis has caused a surge in Iranian applicants.
Third, the professors themselves are under extreme pressure. Everybody knows this.
Fourth, the work a professor outsources to students tends to be the stupidest and worst tasks, because the students usually aren’t good enough to make big contributions. This is depressing for the students: they’re smart people who signed up to work with a famous professor on work they cared about, but their day to day is to do things anyone could do for almost no money.
Finally, the professors are under pressure to create these huge labs. We don’t make profits, so things like funding and number of PhD students are taken to be metrics for evaluating. The US news ranking absurdly includes phd’s per tenure track professor as one of their metrics. So a lot of people are accepted who really shouldn’t be there, and the research is designed to have tons of busy work.
I'm an assistant professor in computer science and have tried a few things to tune down the pressure in my lab. It's always hard to tell what works and what doesn't due to the very small N (N = number of phd students). I also run a small lab (N = 3 right now) so don't have the scaling and funding issues as larger labs.
The thing that seems to be most successful is having every PhD student work with a couple of undergraduate students. Every project has undergraduate student collaborators, so it's never a solo endeavor. There's momentum from others in the project making progress so you're not pushing the boulder yourself. That way they can commiserate together when the results are bad or I'm being sucky.
The other thing I'm starting to try is before I give any negative feedback in person, I ask them how they think they're doing. If they think they're doing great, then it's clearly a mismatch of expectations. I need to figure out how to make the expectations converge before giving negative feedback. I can't think of anything more demoralizing than thinking you're performing well, and then your advisor unexplicably saying you're not productive enough.
Anyways, I think the environment varies substantially between groups. There's certainly some systematic problems (some department culture, some due to the advisor, and some because of being academia in general). But there's probably as many (or more) research labs as startups. So making blanket statements about advisors/advisees is like saying something like "all startups are under extreme VC pressure to monetize" or that "there's a toxic 24/7 work culture at disruptive startups" is similarly overgeneralizing (but probably true for some large number of them).
Nice ideas. Isolation is definitely an issue, and having them work with undergrads will also remind them that they're not at the absolute bottom of the social status hierarchy. They might get jealous of people who actually have a life though.
Sorry, but candidly, this just reads as a bunch of lame excuses to continue a blatant cycle of abuse.
Nothing in my professional 15 year career has come anywhere remotely close to the brutal, absurd reality of what I’ve seen graduate/PhD students go through.
I think academia is nearing a kind of crisis akin to what the the Catholic Church is going through with rampant sex abuse. Diminishing, unimpressive returns in output (aside from a few bright areas), and dark secrets continually being covered up/brushed aside.
I don’t think they’re excuses. They’re explanations of how things happen. The asymmetrical relationship especially explains how professors can get away with treating students badly, but it isn’t a justification. If you read Bad blood, for instance, E Holmes and sunny treat everyone horribly, but ultimately lots of people quit because they have other options.
The pressure on the professor and the selection for obsessiveness explain motives.
Collectively, professors are the ones who set almost every aspect of the culture in academia. They are the ones who populate committees that set all the rules, and decide when a professor is being abusive and when he/she isn't. Professors decide how much is "enough" for a PhD. Even the pressure on professors comes mostly from other professors. A lot of people in the funding agency's committees are professors or former professors. If any change is to occur, it has to come from professors. No external or internal group really has any say in the matter.
So as a professor, the burden of change is pretty much on you. It's probably risky for you to do anything about it[1], but no one else can. When an outsider looks at the situation, all they see are professors pointing fingers at other professors as the cause. It is your profession to fix. And you have less to fear than most workers in most industries: Once you have tenure, attempting to fix the problem will not cost you your job. It will cost other things, but that's the point where it becomes clear what a professor's values are.
And you kind of skirt around it, but a big aspect of it these days is essentially the "rite of passage". As an example, I had a group mate who continually cursed his advisor because he wasn't letting him graduate and was being given work unrelated to his thesis just so that the professor could squeeze as much out of him as possible. Yet when he graduated, he said "Of course I'll treat my students the same. If I had to go through all this, then so should they!"
That's not an uncommon sentiment amongst professors.
Let's all keep in mind: This is mostly a US problem.[2] I don't normally hear these complaints in Europe, and most students there get their PhD in 3 years after their MS.
[1] Not really - there are lots of small things an established professor can do that help.
I agree I would recommend industry to almost everyone. In fact, engineers ask me about grad school several times per year and I almost always discourage them. Too many people think of grad school as sort of a vague "next step" that will "open doors" or else a way of "leveling up" as though life is an RPG and a grad degree is a special badge or skin you can get. I encourage them rather to think concretely about what academia specifically entails: reading abstruse papers, writing papers with little chance of being appreciated, debugging software, writing grants, giving presentations, etc. Academia is only appropriate for a rare type of person, like being a classical musician.
I really love research but here I am stuck in a coding job. I tried my shake at academia but I got depressed at the lack of stability. I wanted to start having a life but there was just no stability in any of it. It's hard to plan long term when you're always 6-12 months away from having your income dry up.
Moral of the story: there's always someone willing to sacrifice more than you whether its their health, money, life, ethics, whatever.
Along with the personal cost, this instability can't be great for producing good science either. My lab has learned and lost some techniques over and over again, as people churn through.
If it were up to me, I'd convert some MS/PhD slots into staff scientist roles with longer contracts. I think you could probably do this in a way that increases productivity, and makes more people more happy to boot.
One of my friends who is a graduate student complains about the difficulty of collaborating with other scientists who lack strong coding skills. They are so focused on the science that there's no time to learn or practice good code hygiene.
If often wondered why labs don't hire regular developers to increase research veliocity. I have no interest in research, but would happily work in the context of academia doing thing like handling merges, ensuring code modularity, maintaining infrastructure, writing unit tests, etc.
This has become a little more common lately, but probably still not as common as it should be.
Part of the problem is funding. You can get 3-4 grad students or ~2 postdocs for the price of a developer. Plus there are lots of existing mechanisms for funding them: training grants, internal and external fellowships, working as a TA, etc. A developer would have to get paid out of research funding, which is already pretty limited. The National Cancer Institute had a program for staff scientists, and the Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative just launched one targeting microscopy, but there aren’t tons of options, especially not for open-ended roles.
There’s been some adverse selection too. I briefly had a programmer but it rapidly became obvious he was working for an academic salary because no one else in their right m8ns would pay him more. I ended up rewriting all of that code, and despite this, my boss keeps sending me fresh-faced undergrads “to do the coding.” I guess the idea that you get what you pay for hasn’t sunk in yet. That said, we’ve also had a few that were excellent and were interested in the projects; I think they were both hired as part of some complicated arrangement where their spouses were recruited for more traditional academic roles.
Another part of it is that code quality hasn’t been a huge priority. That is finally starting to change, but most labs have a lot of code that was unceremoniously promoted from “one-off prototype” to “critical infrastructure” without too many changes. (This, incidentally, gives the lie to peoples’ obsession with YAGNI).
Finally, if anyone does need a neuro/ML themed developer, I call dibs :-) Seriously though, I completely agree that we have have more specialized roles (dev, technical writer/editor) and I think that whatever place manages to make this work could become a research powerhouse. Some of the bigger institutes (the Broad, Janlia Farms, etc) do have some jobs like this already.
Some labs do this! I've seen places where the ratio of engineers to grad students and postdocs was about 1:1. The engineers were salaried and could take courses at the university if they chose to (for free, but on their own time).
A common thread was that these were labs that were joint between the university and a UARC or FFRDC. Academic grant funding doesn't usually include engineers, only PI and students, but FFRDC/UARC funding is different. So look at Johns Hopkins/APL, Penn State/ARL, Georgia Tech/GTRI, then (very importantly) look for labs run by a PI with a faculty appointment at the university.
A friend of mine worked at Hopkins for a few years, did interesting stuff, and walked out with a (free) MS afterwards.
I really do think lab composition's tie to grant wording (if the grant says support for three grad students, you get three grad students, not two grad students and an engineer) has a huge influence on how labs are structured, including why grad students end up doing jobs engineers "should" be doing.
The majority of academic labs do not have the resources to offer the high salaries skilled coders demand and can easily get elsewhere.
And academic research often just needs to be “good enough” for that next paper or grant. Investing lots of time and people into code quality isn’t worthwhile unlesss your whole goal of the lab is to provide software as your output (there are a few, like the Wikipathways group). Bht for everyone else, the ROI is too low, better off working on the next grant or manuscript.
That’s definitely the perception, though I’m not sure how true it actually is. A battle-tested analysis pipeline or experimental control suite is a huge competitive advantage for a lab.
The catch is that it needs to both evolve and stay solid at the same time: it’s hard to predict what you’re going to want in three years—-or find the time to clean up code from the last three years, especially since many of those folks will have moved on.
I agree that it doesn’t matter a whit for any single grant or paper, but one paper (or grant) rarely makes a career.
My claim is that people systematically underestimate the value of good code to a research program. Good infrastructure lets the lab focus on the scientific questions, rather than the logistics of moving and processing the data, which in turn allows them to publish more, better, and faster. This is true for a lot of things: some labs have fantastically good imaging pipelines, or have worked out how to rapidly train animals for certain behaviors, or can reliably do an assay that often fails in others’ hands, and derive a huge benefit from it. Some are so good that I wouldn’t even consider competing with them in their niche. My argument is that good code can also have returns like that.
As a personal example, my first paper at McGill took about three years to finish. The next took about a year and a half (and just came out). We’re on track to submit at least one—-and maybe as many as three—-papers this year. Some of this is due to practice, but a lot of it is due to the fact that we built reusable components instead of “the script that gives the numbers”
> Too many people think of grad school as sort of a vague "next step" that will "open doors" or else a way of "leveling up" as though life is an RPG and a grad degree is a special badge or skin you can get.
I have a Masters, and all the interesting jobs I want to do are held by PhDs (sometimes with a couple years of postdocs). And everyone who's on that team has a PhD and they're definitely not going to let anyone lesser than that onto their team.
I can't speak for the person to whom your replying, but at any big tech company doing anything with recommendations, machine learning, etc. will have teams where having a PhD is huge especially when being considered for promotions
There is an absurd oversupply of graduate students. Where there is an oversupply of labour, there are always abusive conditions. Academia can do all the soul-searching it wants, but the only meaningful solution is to rebalance supply and demand in academia; a very useful first step would be the provision of impartial and informed careers advice to high school and college graduates.
I think this is one of the most important pieces of the puzzle. Graduate students are so common they they can't differentiate themselves from the rest by simply being graduate students. They need to do more to be above the rest and this leads to the bad circumstances.
Commodification. The easier you are to replace, the lower your market value and the weaker your negotiating position. Software developers can earn six-figure salaries and work in offices that look like holiday resorts because demand for their skills massively outweighs supply. Grad students get treated like dirt because the supply of grad students vastly exceeds demand.
Most people who choose to be grad students have better options, which we should encourage them to take.
I don't think oversupply is the causal element in this case. Most of us know that to be a graduate student is to be in an extremely privileged position: it's the pressure from having that position that allows for abuse to be tolerated in that environment, and which normalizes the condition of being abused.
Edit: There's one line from the article that summarizes that point.
> Struggling at the very university he had held up as his dream and trapped between feeling that he could not continue with his Ph.D. program but that he also could not stop, Aguisanda’s thoughts began to spiral.
There's nothing talking about feelings of competition, or of being replaced.
Where were you a graduate student? I was a Stanford EE grad student for 8 years in the 90s (first year was for masters). You know why I was there so long? I loved it. Students returned from industry and said same thing: don't be in a hurry to get out. I worked for a hard-ass prof, they did not let anything slip. The hours I worked were insane, on one project it was literally every waking hour for almost a year. It was worth it to me, I would do it again. But I understand it isn't for everyone. After I graduated, I went to work for a chip startup and after a few months my boss made the comment that he was amazed how well trained I was. But that should not have been a surprise. I had a digital signal processing class with Teresa Meng (founder of Atheros), processor design with Hennessy (designed MIPS architecture), VLSI with Horowitz (founder of Rambus), OS programming with Mendel Rosenblum (founder VMWare), etc. I remember when Jerry and David got their funding to start a company with their little web directory. If that kind of environment doesn't excite you, maybe Stanford isn't for you.
As far as debt goes, I paid for my masters myself with loans (~29k) and the PhD was funded by my advisor with a stipend.
My strongest recommendation is two things: make sure you know why you are there and you are doing it for the right reasons, second, be part of a grad student environment. Don't go it alone. You are all in the same boat and can related to each other. We had a great research group, not everyone else did, spend time to build those relationships with other students or it will be more difficult than it needs to be.
But that isn't just advice for grad school, it really applies to most difficult challenges that we take on in life.
EDIT: one thing I see in other posts I want to address, you do have free time in grad school. Not always, but you do have it. I skied at Tahoe, hiked in Yosemite, toured Napa, visited Carmel & Monterey, went to Half Moon Bay many times, travelled to LA and San Diego. Also, get involved in some sport, physical excursion can really help reduce stress. I played a lot of b-ball in grad school.
It's nice to hear that you had a great experience in grad school; sadly, the original article and the comments here indicate that your experience isn't universal today (at Stanford or elsewhere) by any means.
With regard to some of your specifics: good courses (and/or courses with industry luminaries) aren't the same as a supportive environment for completing your Ph.D. research and dissertation. We should probably question whether pressure-cookers really are the best environment for grad students.
Well, my experience in the industry was that I changed five jobs in six years because in order for my work to be valued as highly as it was really worth, I had to sell it to someone new every year.
What is really brutal in academia is the competition to get your research published and appreciated (by being cited and reused by others). This doesn't happen automatically. The pressure to find something useful to contribute cannot be compared to the pressures in the industry where you basically just have to keep your boss happy if you want to stay in the money. It's a bit like an artistic career, really. You're constantly trying to hit the top 10.
And remember that academics are always required to do something genuinely new, not just "Uber for ice cream, but with AI".
Lots of academics do “Uber for ice cream but with AI.” Academia is iterative.
Arguably, it’s even less competitive than the real world. It’s theory vs. practice. Guess what’s hard? Getting enough paying customers to be sustainable.
> Arguably, it’s even less competitive than the real world.
This might be true at an "organizational" level but I have a hard time believing it's true for individuals.
There are a few people in academia who have incredibly lavish funding (HHMI investigators, people with rich 'patrons'). A few tenured professors can opt out of competition, though this either dramatically limits their impact (no money for students/equipment --> much less research).
Everyone else is constantly scrapping for money and attention and the results are mostly assessed individually, or at best across a small group (PI + 2-4 trainees). In industry, this is at least averaged over the whole company or division.
>> Lots of academics do “Uber for ice cream but with AI.” Academia is iterative.
Iterative, yes, but it must be innovative, not a recombination of existing contributions.
Also, if you only ever contribute tiny baby steps, you will simply not stand out. If you want to build a strong reputation you need strong results that advance the state of the art significantly.
This still sounds like a bunch of excuses to continue abusing people. Intense pressure exists everywhere: don't put academic work on a magical pedestal, there's a lot more to working in the industry than just keeping your boss happy (and uh, a lot more happens in the industry than just building the next Uber for X).
Still no excuse to overwork people to near death (yes, there are extreme outliers like Goldman Sachs & whatnot, but this kind of overwork is a pandemic in academia).
I left one of my junior dev positions in the industry with a stomach ulcer as a souvenir. I don't know what Goldman Sachs is like, but as a junior developer you're expected to do all the work for half the money it's worth and in half the time it would take your senior colleagues.
Edit: and while youre senior colleagues treat your work like rubbish to justify their senior salaries.
What’s on opinion on prevalence of scientific dishonesty and fraud? Given how the incentives work, and that the publications are not checked thoroughly (peer revievers don’t redo the experiments to see if the results were not made up), it just seems to me that modern academia heavily incentivises people to produce fake science.
From what I’ve heard, industries which should heavily depend on academic publications (such as ours, or pharma) are exteremely vary of them because, in their experience, the „findings” and ideas presented usually don’t replicate, or that the papers are just intellectually dishonest in various ways to present the author’s method as better that state of the art (salesmanship instead of science).
>> Third, the professors themselves are under extreme pressure. Everybody knows this.
I dont' think everyone appreciates this, actually. But, if it's bad for your mental health to go through the pressure of a PhD for three or four years- how much worse can it be to keep this up for the next 40 years or so, as a professor? And now you are under even more pressure because you're responsible for your students' careers also.
This is my biggest doubt about continuing in academia after I finish my PhD (if I do). I realised that my advisor is always on a tight budget - on everything: funding, time, attention, interest... Do I really want to put myself in that position?
It’s hard. During the pre-tenure time it’s hard not to burn out as a professor. I almost did. With that said, I’ve had all three careers: being a software developer (at a research lab, but building products), running a security evaluation company, and being a tenured professor. Being a professor has some downsides, but the redeeming element for me is that I love being my own boss and being able to pick the problems I work on — those that also interest me. I didn’t have that luxury in industry. Aside from the low pay, grad school was even better because I could spend a week thinking about a problem and make no progress, and I didn’t feel bad about it.
I imagine that the experience of being a grad student is much worse when you have a terrible slavedriver advisor. I was fortunate to avoid that. Even so, the key to grad school (and academia) is to know when you’re having a bad experience and when to get out. In CS (in the US at least) you can leave with a terminal MS relatively easy and have no debt. Go into the program with your eyes open and an exit to industry as a fallback and you’ll be much happier.
Totally agree with the second paragraph (I'm a current grad student). My advisor is excellent, and while I've often had to push myself to the limit of what I can get done, I've also had a tremendous amount of freedom on how to get things done. And when things aren't as busy, I have more time to explore things in a self-motivated way. If I didn't have such a great PI and team, I would have strongly considered dropping out with the masters.
What concerns me most about continuing in academia is the extreme uncertainty in living situation and funding. That seems draining both emotionally and professionally.
I’d also add to this that the quality standards in academia are generally piss poor, and my own type A perfectionism was a big reason why I did not follow in my advisor’s footsteps after finishing grad school: I saw that he rose to fame and rank by essentially creating low-quality demoware to be pleasing to the eye at conferences, and had zero ambition to work on results or problems important to the field.
Professors are not self-selected for any notion of quality at all. Some of them happen to focus on quality, some of them on politics, etc., just like anything else.
In many companies, being promoted to senior levels of engineering is a far more meaningful mark of quality effectiveness than post-graduate degrees or research publications.
Regardless of any of this, treating students with respect, working with them to define their work based on their career goals, and respecting a healthy standard work/life balance is a basic requirement of professionalism.
By this notion, a lot of professors are not professionals in their field, rather just compulsive amateurs.
I think this really depends on the field. In mathematics, my field, you can argue that the work of various people is undervalued, but it's a bit harder to argue that certain theorems are overvalued. However, the metrics of evaluation for theorems are quite different than those for... 'demoware'...?
Those points are all understandable and, as a non-academic, it's good to hear the perspective of a prof, while I usually see more written about the perspective of students
Do you have any suggestions on how to improve the problems you pointed out? To an outsider with many friends who are grad students / postdocs, seem pretty difficult to address, like the metrics that inform tenure selection, while others seem like areas where one could make progress (more empathy, training etc)
> the grad student/professor relationship is inherently asymmetrical, much more so than most employer/employee relationships... So many professors treat their students like robots
Power corrupts, apparently.
> Nothing about becoming a professor selects for kindness or empathy...
Quality of advising should be important, but of course that's not what they're selected for or rewarded for.
So few places I’ve worked did an engineer actually get promoted to manager. Mostly product managers with little technical expertise...they used to be in sales. I’ve had a few engineers as managers, they were mostly really good. Just not many.
“We keep inventing jobs because of this false idea that everybody has to be employed at some kind of drudgery…. He must justify his right to exist.”
This is a framing designed to get attention but is obviously empty. "We" don't "invent" jobs. There isn't some big council of job inventors we all sit on with the purpose of giving everyone a right to exist. People and organizations decide to hire people for various reasons, and people sign up to be hired---usually so they can make money. Jobs are agreements between people. This is true even of government jobs in a democratic society: people are hired by various government agencies which, with a couple of jobfare exceptions, hire people for reasons of their own---not because of a mandate to make up jobs for people. This is a plea to an imaginary decision-maker.
Eh. Supply and demand matters. There's a supply of labor even for bullshit jobs, in part because of a lack of reasonable alternatives to having a job. If there was something people could do that didn't pose a direct threat to their own safety that didn't involve "job" (you know, like UBI), then jobs would have to compete much harder for employees - better wages, or more importantly, being intrinsically rewarding.
Of course, it's quite possible for the supply of workers to exceed the demand for workers. It's not a pretty sight - read up on the Great Depression for example. And that seems to be exactly where we're headed right now. People who once worked in jobs that no longer exist thanks to technological advance and market forces, who have no alternative ways to make a living, and are getting shamed as lazy moochers for it. That's how revolutions happen.
There may be a supply of labor for such jobs, but why is there a demand for it?
If I run a company, my goal is not to hire a bunch of people to do useless "work". I want as few such people as possible, not just because I have to pay them, but also because they slow everyone else down doing the work that actually earns money. In a capitalist economy where inefficient firms can go bankrupt, why is there demand for people who will do useless work?
One possible answer is that we don't actually live in a capitalist society - that government influence prevents real capitalism from happening. There is some truth to that position, but I doubt that people who promote the "useless jobs" theory think that less government involvement is the solution.
I think the correct answer is that the "useless jobs" theory is flawed. No company is deliberately hiring people to do useless work. (Some empire-building managers within companies may do so, however.) The jobs are useless because of inefficiency in the company, not by design, and a more efficient company would find something real for those people to do.
It's easy to tell who's pulling their weight in a company of a couple dozen, but beyond that it's near impossible. And frankly what I've seen is that a company is more likely to use it's capital to block competition than to become more efficient. And even efforts that are on their face about becoming more efficient like layoffs, instead tend to be more about internal power struggles than gaining efficiency.
I think "useless" doesn't mean that it doesn't benefit the employer, but rather that it doesn't benefit the employee, and it arguably doesn't benefit society.
It benefits the employee. That's what a paycheck is.
What I think you're trying to say is that the employee doesn't perceive any meaning in the job. And if you do mean that, I can whole-heartedly agree with you.
And, arguably, the employee can't perceive any meaning in the job because they can see that the job doesn't benefit society in any meaningful way.
It's not clear to me what the solution is, either.
Whatever the solution is, we need to get to it, and fast. I've been reading Andrew Yang's The War on Normal People (among other books), and it is terrifying. We are poised to shed tens of millions more jobs (in addition to the millions we've already lost) in the next decade or two, due to virtually every repetitive job (what he distinguishes as routine, rather than non-routine) being replaced by robots that do it faster and better for less money. And there is nothing on the horizon to replace them, to provide an alternative income for the millions of truck drivers, fast food workers, call center operators, retail clerks, insurance agents, paralegals, even doctors who are about to become obsolete.
And if the answer to this dilemma is to throw them out on the streets because they're obviously lazy and/or stupid, exploiting our hard-earned tax dollars with their immoral ways - or to just keep swelling the ranks of unemployment and disability and "retraining" programs that will never lead anywhere - then the people who are still able to make it are going to face some very nasty shocks.
If supply and demand matters then it would seem employment does not exist because of societal wish for people to justify their existence with madeup jobs, but rather because of many independent decisions between workers and employers. This was my point.
This is the type of decision-making the authors of the Green New Deal need to grapple with. E.g., the Green New Deal calls for high speed rail everywhere. But when you actually try to build HSR people in affected communities file lawsuits and force decisions that increase the cost, slow down trains and delay construction. For the Green New Deal to actually happen, the federal government would need to override local decision-making.
The weird thing is that, even though a lot of policy is oriented toward making you a conscious consumer (high deductibles, coinsurance) in many cases you just can’t do it,at least not very well.
My wife got an allergy test at a local allergy clinic, but she had 20% coinsurance so we tried to figure out how much it would cost. Everyone there treated us like garbage. Even when we called the billing department in advance they told us there was no way to know in advance how much the basic allergy test would cost until she saw the doctor.
So we went to the clinic (stupidly), and the nurses just acted like we were crazy. Finally one did tell us what the bill would be:$12k. I had researched these tests online and was floored; that’s way more expensive than it should be, and the doctor who gave her a referral had told us it would be a reasonable price. So we were in the awkward position of just leaving the appointment. The doctor then basically talked to us somberly like we were the poorest people on earth, and said “listen, most of the test is for allergens that don’t exist in northern California.” If I just give u the local ones it’ll be like $1800.” I started laughing. Later on I read an NPR story about a lady who had a$48k allergy test from there. Just a complete scam, much worse than a car dealer because at least there they will tell you a price and they will not sell you ten extra useless cars evenif you don’t explicitly say “don’t give me ten superfluous cars for no reason.” Anyway, we got the limited test, and at the end the doctor said “listen I’m not supposed to do this, but given the financial hardship I’ll make an exception. If I don’t put the results in the system you’ll only be charged for the visit.” And he just wrote the results on a yellow notepad paper and tore it out for us.
Tldr we were treated like annoying busybodies for asking the price at an in-network facility, and then treated like indigents when we balked at paying way more than anywhere else charges, for totally bs procedures.
Normally when markets have so much unsold inventory, prices fall to clear it out. But prices can be "sticky" and won't go down. All this unsold inventory makes you wonder why the prices are so sticky.
Here you can see one reason:
"Shanghai homebuyers came out in droves to protest a developer's decision to cut prices in an apartment complex."
I'm sure there are others. Like if you're holding a loan for a giant apartment complex, and the owner cuts the price, it becomes immediately obvious that the loan is not going to be paid back in full. But say it's a 30-year loan: if you get the owner to keep the prices high and the units unsold a little long, maybe you can unload the loan onto some other bank or investor before the reckoning comes. Or maybe you're a bureaucrat who will be fired if the prices go down.
I have also heard that in China it can be difficult for person to rent out a vacant property. So people are holding onto empty units just as a store of value, like bars of gold.
It’s inaccurate to say that we “can’t” escape it. The federal reserve has been raising interest rates to slow inflation and growth in employment, and for years they have paid interest on bank reserves at the fed and constantly talked up plans to unwind their portfolio (selling off assets). If they had done less of all that we would have higher inflation.
Same is true of some other central banks. I always am frustrated when I hear about japan not being able to raise inflation rates much. If their activities have no impact on inflation at all, why not buy up all the securities and foreign exchange in the world by printing yen? The Japanese could live entirely off the dividends because of this magical property of their central bank.
If the central banks sold off all the bonds they bought with QE, that'd cause deflation, not inflation. In fact, the japanese central bank is printing money and buying up ETFs. It's too soon to say if this is a success, but thus far, hardly any inflation!
