pro_sprond
9mo ago
Interesting idea. Perhaps if academia had developed in a world where two-career households were common, this sort of thing would have become standard practice. In our world though, it's hard to imagine it happening any time in the near-to-mid-term future.
pro_sprond
9mo ago
I imagine that in such a case they would offer the husband a teaching-focused non-tenure track role like lecturer (I realize that lecturer means something different in the UK).
pro_sprond
9mo ago
That's a reasonable point. However, there are some cases of spousal hiring where the "leading" partner has already been at the university for a long time and wants a spousal hire because they started a new relationship with someone from another institution. In this case, it's less clear that there's no principle agent problem (for example, the "leading" partner might have personal ties to people involved with hiring at the university that induce them to make a spousal hire they wouldn't have otherwise).
pro_sprond
9mo ago
Yes, I completely agree with that.
pro_sprond
9mo ago
I don't totally disagree with you. As I said, I think academia produces a lot of things of zero, or even negative, value and a lot of humanities research doesn't impress me much. I'm also pretty open to arguments that as a society we invest too much in academia or that academia should be greatly reorganized to be more cost-effective. I could even understand someone who believes that the net benefits of academic research are not worth the cost (though I disagree). But the view you seemed to express above, that superstar researchers don't produce any deliverables and that academia produces nothing of value, seems clearly wrong to me. My experience has been that in science and engineering, superstar researchers generally do have impressive achievements (though this is not quite the same thing as claiming that their achievements are worth the amount of money spent on them; I believe that too, but it's a different claim).
As I said in my original post, I personally am ambivalent about spousal hiring.
pro_sprond
9mo ago
I mostly agree with your explanation of how spousal hires came to be common and accepted, but I think feminism might play a somewhat smaller role than you ascribe to it. It had some influence, but in my opinion, its most important effect was simply increasing the number of couples where both partners are academics. As long as such couples are common, and as long as the academic job market works the way it does now, spousal hiring will be appealing.
What exactly is a superstar researcher? What kind of deliverable or output do they produce?
To the university, their main value is prestige (but also occasionally lucrative patents). For society as a whole, it greatly depends on the field the researcher works in. In humanities, it is sometimes hard to quantify the worth of a researcher's output but in science and engineering, it is often more clear-cut. To take one recent example, Jennifer Doudna became a superstar researcher for her part in discovering CRISPR, which seems likely to have a lot of value to society.
In my opinion, you have a level of cynicism about academic research that does not seem warranted. I agree that a lot of research is not useful and some is also in service of a political agenda, but over time a lot of tremendously useful/important scientific discoveries and inventions have come out of academia. I heard that once, superstar researchers in physics even invented a new type of bomb.
pro_sprond
9mo ago
What are the odds that their partner is sufficiently below average to drag the level of the university down?
Yes, for the university it is probably a net improvement (at least in terms of prestige). But for the field as a whole or for the broader society, it may not be.
pro_sprond
9mo ago
This is an interesting point, but I disagree that my post was "utterly bizarre" and that my thought experiments "make no sense" because they (mostly) don't involve children. Let me respond in three different ways.
First, I did kind of mention children, but only briefly and indirectly. I said that the academic career path makes it harder to start a family.
Second, all of the spousal hires that I am personally familiar with did not involve children (although it is always possible that the couple in question will have children later and in one case this did indeed happen). I realize that your experience was different. I have also never seen the existence of children used to justify specific spousal hires, but of course I don't know what was said in hiring committees or private conversations. In any case, from my experience it's absolutely clear that spousal hiring often takes place with no kids involved and that many people support it for reasons besides those involving children. So I don't think my thought experiments are invalid at all.
Third, and most importantly, I am not sure if the presence of children should make a difference. From a university's perspective, spousal hiring is justified because giving extra benefits to prestigious researchers makes them more likely to accept your job offer. You point out that the convenience does not just have to be the convenience of being in the same place as your romantic partner, it can also include the convenience of having your entire family (including children) in the same place. Part of the point of my thought experiments is that there are other notions of "convenience" (such as being in the same place as your close friend) that may be valued by researchers and could, in theory, be addressed by something similar to spousal hiring.
There are also other tricky ethical questions involving spousal hiring and children. Why does a university owe it to its employees to make it easier to have kids? Does the fact that a practice makes it easier to take care of kids make it not nepotism? Should couples with children be treated better than couples without children? Moreover, it seems hard to build a coherent policy where spousal hiring is justified mainly by concerns about raising children. If spousal hires are extended only to people with children then what about people who don't have children yet, but plan to? Or if spousal hires are extended to couples who have or plan to have children, what happens if a couple claims to plan to have children but then doesn't?
I want to emphasize that I don't necessarily disagree with you. I said that one of the strongest arguments in favor of spousal hiring is that it is convenient and makes the lives of (some) people in academia better. One part of that is that it helps people in romantic relationships in general and another part, as you point out, is that it helps people with kids. Perhaps someone who is strongly pro-natalist could also support it on the grounds that it may increase the number of children. I am genuinely unsure if spousal hiring is on net a good thing and the fact that it makes things easier for couples with kids is certainly part of the argument for it.
There is another point I would like to address. You say that "you can easily have a ldr without kids" and that "you can't look after kids [in different locations]." I don't fully agree with either of these. Many people find it difficult to maintain a relationship long-distance, especially when the long-distance phase lasts for many years. I know of at least one academic couple who have lived in separate states for decades but I think they are very unusual. In any case, it is clear that many people prefer to live in the same place as their romantic partners. Also, I have known couples with kids who lived apart for several years (including couples where one partner was in academia). It surely sucks a lot and I would not want to do it, but it's not impossible.
pro_sprond
9mo ago
Within the fields I'm familiar with, there is a clear and reasonably large difference in quality between the median researcher at a top university and the median researcher at a mid-tier university. So I'm not sure I agree with you.
Spousal Hiring in Academia
I'm curious what people here think about spousal hiring in academia. It's a topic that I have thought a lot about without reaching any firm conclusions so I thought it might be interesting to discuss it here. Since the practice might not be well known to people outside of academia, I'll explain how it works before sharing some of my own thoughts.
Spousal hiring is meant to address a common problem in academia: academics are often in romantic relationships with other academics and it can be hard for them to both find a job in the same city. The reason this is hard is that academic jobs are unusually spread out. Even the biggest cities have no more than about 10 major research universities—for mid-sized cities there's often only one—and even a large department at a major university may only hire a couple faculty members per year. Some people call this the "two-body problem" but I kind of hate that name. Regardless, this can be a major source of frustration for people in academia and some couples spend years living far apart from each other because of it.
To deal with this problem, it has become increasingly common for universities to offer spousal hires. When a university wants to hire a researcher whose romantic partner is also in academia, they will sometimes also make a job offer to the partner (note that I said partner not spouse; in spite of the name, there is almost never a marriage requirement). Sometimes, the partner is hired as a tenure-track professor. Other times, they are given some kind of less prestigious position, like lecturer (a teaching-only role with lower salary and no tenure). Often, they would not have considered hiring the partner if not for spousal hiring. There is a related situation that is sometimes also referred to as spousal hiring where a researcher at a university starts a new romantic relationship with a researcher at another university and asks their current university to offer a job to their new partner. See here for a much more detailed account of how spousal hiring works on a practical level.
You might wonder what's in it for the university. The answer is basically that this is a way for lower-ranked universities (or even just not-literally-Harvard universities) to recruit better researchers than they would be able to otherwise. So usually spousal hires are only made on behalf of researchers somewhat better than the typical researcher hired by that university. Some universities also view it as a way to guarantee that professors will stick around for longer. Not all universities are big on spousal hiring, and even when they are it makes the whole process more complicated. So if you are an academic couple who managed to get jobs at the same university due to a spousal hire, you might be less inclined to go through the whole job search process again just to move to a slightly more prestigious university.
My impression is that in the past, spousal hiring was frowned upon or even outright forbidden due to concerns aobut nepotism (see here for a reference to this). Nowadays, however, it is common, at least in the US and Canada. I personally know of several examples and have heard anecdotes about at least a dozen more.
I have mixed feelings about spousal hiring. On the one hand, it can be very frustrating to not be able to find a job in the same city as your romantic partner. On the other hand, there are some obvious negative aspects:
- The most obvious is that spousal hiring leads to worse researchers being hired than would be otherwise. Of course, universities usually deny this, but it seems implausible that it's not true at least in some cases. Even when the partner is hired as a low-salary lecturer it still means that a lecturer is being selected not because they are the best teacher but because of other factors.
- It seems that in the US at least, it is no longer common to see spousal hiring as nepotism and claiming it is can sometimes even get you accused of sexism (or of being a dinosaur). But... it seems like spousal hiring matches the plain reading of the definition of nepotism pretty well. Now I can imagine responding to this by saying that not all nepotism is especially bad and this is one example, but I'm not sure I've ever actually seen someone make that argument.
- Relatedly, spousal hiring just feels unfair. When you fail to get hired for a job you want, there is rarely a single cause. But it is probably natural for some people to feel resentful if they don't get a job, but someone seemingly less talented does because of spousal hiring.
- Spousal hires have the potential to cause a lot of drama. There are obvious problems like: what if there is a nasty breakup and you're left with two people who hate each other stuck in the same department. But that's not all. For example, departments usually only hire a few faculty members per year and current faculty often compete to have their preferred candidate hired. If that preferred candidate is pushed out in favor of a spousal hire, that can create hurt feelings.
- It's also not clear that spousal hiring is even good for the partner who is hired, at least in terms of job satisfaction and research productivity. I suspect it doesn't feel good to think that you were hired not because of your own abilities and talent but just because of who you are in a relationship with. Also, even if unintentionally, other faculty members may treat spousal hires differently. In this essay, a spousal hire thoughtfully discusses some negative psychological and social consequences of being a spousal hire.
I think spousal hiring mostly continues (and remains reasonably popular) because it's so convenient for many of the people involved. Universities get to hire researchers who would normally be out of their league. Superstar researchers get to work in the same city as their romantic partner. Grad students, postdocs and other young academics who have partners in academia (which is extremely common) get to imagine that they too will not have to choose between a career in academia and living in the same city as their partner. I also think this very convenience is one of the strongest arguments in favor of spousal hiring. The thing that sucks the most about the academic career path is not having much control over where you live, which makes it harder to maintain relationships, start a family and so on. Is doing something that makes that a little better really so bad?
However, I think that because spousal hiring is so convenient for so many people, it is often a bit controversial to question it (also since traditionally spousal hiring was seen as benefiting women, questioning it can be seen as vaguely sexist). To gain better intuition for the topic, I think it is interesting to consider some thought experiments.
- In the future, polyamory has become normalized. A superstar researcher is being recruited by a university and he asks for spousal hires for his two partners. Is this okay? If not, why not? If so, is there any number of partners for which it would not be okay? Or does it just depend on how much of a superstar he is?
- A superstar researcher is happily single. While being recruited by a university, she asks that, instead of being offered a spousal hire, she is simply given a salary increase commensurate with what the spousal hire would have cost (and agrees to do the extra teaching and committee work that the spousal hire would have done). Is this okay?
- A superstar researcher is single (his wife died) but is very devoted to his daughter, who is also an academic. The superstar researcher is being recruited by a university and asks that his daughter be hired as well. Is this okay? Is it nepotism?
- A superstar researcher is single (her husband died) but is extremely close friends with another, less accomplished, researcher. The superstar is being recruited by a university and asks the university to also hire her friend. Is this okay? If they refuse and she then reveals she is in a relationship with the other researcher, does that make it okay? Why is a sexual relationship better than an extremely close friendship? What if after she reveals that she is in a relationship with her friend, they hire the friend but then find out that she just lied about the relationship to get her friend hired?
- A superstar researcher is hired and his wife is hired with him as part of a spousal hire. Later, they get divorced and he starts a relationship with another researcher at a different institution. He asks his current university to hire his new partner. Is this okay?
- A superstar researcher is married to a stay-at-home husband but is also having an affair with another researcher. The superstar researcher is being recruited by a university and asks that her boyfriend be hired as well. Is this an acceptable spousal hire?
- A superstar researcher wants his friend to be hired but his university refuses. So he starts a romantic relationship with his friend and then asks for a spousal hire. Has he done something wrong?
As I said, I really don't have a firm opinion about whether spousal hiring is good or not (or under what circumstances) and I'm curious what all of you think.
pro_sprond
9mo ago
Did I say it was a bad thing? I was simply responding to someone upthread who seemed surprised that a movie like Idiocracy could be the product of liberal culture despite seeming conservative in some ways. It's not surprising since the creator has some conservative sympathies.
My view, in case you are curious, is that it's good to have people of a variety of political and cultural perspectives, including conservatives, making art and entertainment and also I enjoy King of the Hill.
pro_sprond
9mo ago
As a number of people have pointed out over the years, Mike Judge (the director and co-writer of Idiocracy) seems to have some conservative sympathies. For example, Hank Hill in King of the Hill is a fairly sympathetic portrayal of a conservative suburban Texan and the liberal people in Beavis and Butthead are not exactly always portrayed as admirable.
pro_sprond
9mo ago
The way that HBD is used around here seems to imply some amount of believing that racial differences in traits like intelligence (1) exist and (2) are significantly heritable. This is an idea that deBoer clearly rejects while still agreeing that on an individual level such differences exist and are significantly heritable. But perhaps I've misunderstood the term.
pro_sprond
9mo ago
It is a desirable social outcome but it's not the only desirable social outcome. Every policy has tradeoffs and my main point is that we should recognize that meritocratic policies have (massive) benefits that don't fit into the framework of "someone is better off because they got a high-paying job through their hard work and abilities." I agree that I could have phrased this better.
even granting his premise the least talented have a hell of a lot more wealth, stability and success than any other system that has been tried.
I tried to gesture at something like this later on in my post. However, I don't think I quite agree with your phrasing here. Freddie seems to either think or at least think that proponents of "equality of opportunity" think that policies should be judged on how "just" they are in some personal-morality sense (e.g. he says "Core to that whole conception of justice is the notion that talent and hard work are something inherent to the individual or under the control of the individual"). That is a premise of his that I do reject.
pro_sprond
9mo ago
He claims that we should ensure that even stupid and untalented people still have some minimal level of material comfort.
I'm not convinced that his point is this simple. First, stupid and untalented people do have some minimal level of material comfort in every rich country around the world today. You could argue that it's not enough comfort or that it leaves out people who are psychotic (and children of people who are psychotic) or who have other problems much larger than "lack of talent" but then it becomes mostly a question of what is the necessary "minimal level of comfort." Second, and more importantly, I have never, ever heard someone who argues for "equality of opportunity" say that they want stupid/untalented people to not have some minimal level of material comfort. This seems to fundamentally misunderstand the debate about "equality of opportunity" vs "equality of outcome." If this is Freddie's whole point then it's like weighing in on an argument about taxation to say that we shouldn't execute people who don't pay their taxes. It's fighting a complete strawman of a position. Third, deBoer is an avowed socialist, of the pretty-much-a-communist type and I'm not convinced he doesn't favor a pretty radical program of wealth redistribution.
DeBoer, in this essay, does not claim that we should use money to reward people for being good.
At the very least, he seems to think that most people arguing for equality of opportunity think this. Otherwise it's hard to explain this line: "Core to that whole conception of justice is the notion that talent and hard work are something inherent to the individual or under the control of the individual." My point is that, no, that notion is not at all core to the argument for "equality of opportunity" and also, the best argument for "equality of opportunity" is not really about "justice" in the way that people normally use the word.
In defense of inheritance, one could argue that letting parents pass on their wealth to their children encourages the parents to work harder and thus leads to better social outcomes overall.
I agree that this is a reasonable argument for allowing inheritance (and for not taxing it too heavily). It's also an argument easily overlooked by people too invested in the "virtue theory of money." The children who inherit their parents' money did not do anything virtuous to earn it so (some people think) why should they get it?
pro_sprond
9mo ago
DeBoer is missing the entire point of why markets succeed, because he doesn't understand resources. Resources don't "exist", they are created by people.
I mostly agree and this is part of my point. But my main goal was not to harp on deBoer or explain why he in particular is wrong. I was trying to explain why many people make this mistake. My thesis is that there is an intuitive but misguided idea that "people who are good deserve to be rewarded and salary/jobs/other opportunities are an appropriate reward" and that this idea leads people away from policies that lead to greater total societal wealth.
However, I think I do have some disagreements with you. First, things are often not so simple as one person single-handedly creating resources. Often, useful products are the coordinated work of many people and it is not so obvious who deserves how much credit or who should "control" the final product. For example, when RIchard Hamming invented error-correcting codes, how much credit did Shannon deserve for inspiring him? How about Bell Labs for giving him the chance to do basic research without any guarantee that it would pay off? How about the university that educated him? And so on.
Also, while I do think that the free market is underrated by many, I also believe that there are some times where some government intervention is useful. Essentially for all the usual intro economics about public goods, externalities and communication costs, etc (as well as for a few slightly more idiosyncratic reasons that I may write a top-level post about some other time).
pro_sprond
9mo ago
I inhale at the thought of such a dreadful fate. What horror!
The fact that this is such a common reaction is part of why I think that (absent other incentives) middle managers would be undersupplied.
Seriously though, most countries already have progressive taxation and a welfare system. Wealth is redistributed from the most capable and luckiest to the less lucky and capable.
I agree, though of course wealth distribution is a continuous variable, not a discrete one. My view is that as societies become richer they become more and more capable of providing poor people with welfare. This is one of the benefits of being a rich society and part of the argument for why we shouldn't jeopardize the things that drive our societal wealth (though I realize that increasing welfare benefits can hurt that goal; there's some tradeoff and it's not always easy to decide what exactly the best path is).
I think it also serves to shore up social stability aside from moral concerns.
Good point.
It looks like he's beginning to believe HBD but is trying to retroactively justify his earlier highly egalitarian beliefs anyway, which leads us disturbingly close to Handicapper-Generals.
I don't think deBoer believes in HBD per se, but he clearly believes that talent, intelligence, etc have significant heritability and he has believed this for a while (it's a major part of the premise of his first book). I don't think he's trying to retroactively justify his egalitarian beliefs; I think he really just sincerely thinks it's unfair that people who are kind but stupid will not do great in a meritocratic society and has somehow failed to see the reasons why a meritocratic society might be good despite that.
pro_sprond
9mo ago
The Virtue Theory of Money
Recently, Freddie deBoer published an essay called "What Would a Functioning System of Equal Opportunity Look Like for the Losers" complaining about how unfair "equality of opportunity" is. The main point is that since talent is partially heritable, if we reward people based on their abilities then people who have been unlucky in the genetic lottery will be left worse off. It's a little hard to tell exactly what way of distributing resources Freddie would prefer instead, but he seems to have the opinion that it is unjust for luck to play a significant role. In Freddie's words: "it’s hard to see how rewarding talent falls under a rubric of distributing resources to people based on that which they can control."
I think Freddie's essay is a good example of a misunderstanding about the benefits of equality of opportunity—a misunderstanding I've come to think of as the Virtue Theory of Money. Basically, this is my name for the belief that the main purpose of money is to reward people for being good.
In my experience, many people seem to have some sort of implicit belief that people should be rewarded by society according to how virtuous they are. This takes different forms: some people emphasize hard-work, conscientiousness and so on. Others emphasize the difficulty or social value of the job that someone is doing. For example, some people argue that affirmitive action is bad because it prevents talented, hardworking people from getting the jobs/university spots that they deserve. As another example, some people argue that teachers should be paid more because of how important their jobs are. The labor theory of value also seems to be partially motivated by this idea.
Read in this light, Freddie is basically complaining that talent is not a virtue and so we should not reward people for being talented. (He also seems to believe that the reason talent is not a virtue is because it is influenced by genetics, which is outside our control. I find that idea somewhat incoherent—all sorts of other apparent virtues like generosity or open-mindedness are also influenced by genetics, but that's irrelevant to my main point.)
However, I think this idea is almost totally wrong. In my view, the main reason to reward some people more than others is if doing so leads to better social outcomes. The point is not to provide personal benefit to the people rewarded but to incentivize behavior that benefits the entire society.
As an example, I believe that the best argument against affirmitive action is not that it personally hurts the individual people denied positions because of it (though I do feel sympathy for them) but because it deprives society of having the most capable people in the most important jobs. The reason that we want to select the most talented people to become doctors is because it's good to have good doctors not because being a doctor is a nice reward for being a top student. Likewise, the best argument for paying teachers more is if doing so would lead to better educational outcomes of enough magnitude to be worth the extra cost. I agree that plenty of teachers (though far from all) are nice, hard-working people who do a demanding job. But again, a job is not supposed to be a reward for being a good person, it's supposed to be a way to get something useful done.
I also think this is a serious issue. Basing hiring decisions and salaries on how virtuous people seem can cause resources to be poorly allocated in a way that hurts everybody. If we followed the Virtue Theory of Money then too many people would want to be teachers (it's already a popular job even without a major salary boost) and not enough would want to be middle managers or accountants. We would have worse doctors, engineers and scientists.
So my main response to Freddie complaining about "equality of opportunity" leading to talented people being rewarded more is: that's exactly the point! We want talented people to be incentivized to apply their talents instead of doing some routine job that almost anyone else can do. Stop trying to use the virtue theory of money and think about the long-term conseuqences of policy decisions.
Now, I do want to add a couple caveats to this. First, I think it's bad to let people suffer a lot when society has sufficient resources to help them. So I think it's reasonable for the government to give some help to people who don't have the ability to get high quality jobs. But I think we should be aware that the government is only able to do this because of how rich our society is and that this wealth depends on incentivizing talented people to use their talents. Second, I do think that there is some value in rewarding people purely for their virtue. I want to live in a society of virtuous people and so I would like virtue to be incentivized even if the economic benefits are not always easy to measure. However, I think this should usually be a secondary concern.
pro_sprond
11mo ago
There seems to be some tension between this idea and the fact that the increase in reported gender dysphoria cases has been driven more by gender dysphoria in biological females rather than biological males.
pro_sprond
11mo ago
This is something I'd be really interested to learn more about. I had trouble quickly finding data about sexual development disorders, especially of the sort that cause opposite gender anatomical features. You do seem to be correct that there has been an increase in cases of precocious puberty and that fact does seem relevant (and I appreciate you mentioning it). On the other hand, precocious puberty is almost the opposite of changing gender. On the other other hand, it seems at least plausible to think that endocrine disrupters would just cause an increase in all kinds of disorders including disorders that increase sexual differentiation and those that decrease it. So I think overall I take this as mild evidence for the endocrine disrupters -> gender dysphoria theory but I'm also way out of my depth on the biology knowledge needed to know how plausible all this is and what would be good supporting or contradicting evidence.
pro_sprond
11mo ago
I think most of your points are spot-on. However, I think I don't quite agree with this:
The likelihood that West gathers the requisite support that doing anything to oppose him is necessary is remote.
There is a small-but-not-vanishingly-small chance that West could play spoiler in the general election. In 2016 and 2020, the election outcome could have been flipped by changing a relatively small number of votes in a few key states, such as Wisconsin. Here "relatively small" means something like 30,000, which, for reference, is about 1% of the Wisconsin electorate. It doesn't seem impossible that West, if he really ends up participating in the general election, would be able to get 1% of the vote in key states. I think it's not too likely and it's also likely that in a close election between Trump and Biden, West would exit the race rather than play spoiler. But I don't think it's impossible.
Also recall that when another West ran for president in 2020, the Democratic party took active steps to try to prevent him from appearing on the ballot in Wisconsin for fear that he would hurt Biden's chances there.
pro_sprond
11mo ago
Yes, but doesn't this imply that if endocrine disrupters are the main cause of the explosion in gender dysphoria cases then we should also see an explosion in sexual development disorders (with e.g. changes to anatomy) that are also linked to endocrine disrupters? I'm open to being convinced that either (1) this is wrong or (2) such an explosion is occurring. Absent such an explanation, it at least seems like a potential inconsistency in the story.
pro_sprond
11mo ago
I'm not sure why you keep insisting on specifying "cloth or surgical masks" when the OP just said "masks." Also, there is a major societal dispute about whether masks (including N95 and the like) are effective. It seems reasonable to expect someone who claims they are "entirely ineffective" to have decent supporting evidence.
Let me just ask you directly: do you think it's true that N95 masks are entirely ineffective at reducing the spread of covid? If so, do you think the evidence for this is so obvious that no reasonable person should question it? If not, then I'm not sure what we're arguing about.
In my experience, spousal hires are typically not for things like "DEI officer" (or at least I wouldn't call that a spousal hire) but for research or teaching roles.
I also think your example with law firms is a bit different because if a different organization is doing the spousal hiring then that organization still has incentive to make sure the person they hire meets their standards. Also there are typically far more jobs for lawyers in one city than for, say, theoretical physicists.
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