Jeremy Spater
@JeremySpater
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I've left academia for a private-sector job. I hadn't planned to contribute to
#QuitLit
, but some ideas have been rattling around in my head, and since the factors that led me out of academia are mostly tied to broader conditions, some of this might be of relevance to others. 🧵
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In my experience, most people who leave academia don't do so because they "lose sight of the beauty and real value in the academic pursuit of knowledge". Rather, they are pushed out by systemic conditions that create an increasingly precarious path to a stable academic position.
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It's remarkable what people are willing to do for the opportunity to contribute to the production of knowledge, but it's not reasonable to demand these kinds of sacrifices from scholars and their families. Can we not think of a better way of doing things?
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I personally believe that the problems are baked into the paradigm, and that these efforts to fix them have made research more expensive & cumbersome without addressing the underlying issues. We need to rethink the basic concept of social science, not just keep adding hoops.
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3. Epistemological misalignment
From ~1980-2010, give or take, poli sci underwent a 'methods war' about what social science is and should be. The result has been a dominant paradigm I would describe as 'economics lite,' with other perspectives becoming marginal.
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Nice to see this in print:
A short summary of some high points: 🧵(1/3)
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Poli sci provides great preparation for industry. I ended up with a good job, in the city where I want to be, and I know others with similar experiences (Glad to chat about making the transition - send a DM).
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To summarize, conditions of scarcity mean that good papers languish for years through multiple cycles of peer review, and deserving scholars languish for years through multiple cycles of the job market.
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Conditions of scarcity and the expectation of mobility mean that staying in academia is costly. For me, this epistemological misalignment -- my own doubts about the paradigm to which I'm contributing -- have led me to find that industry is a better opportunity.
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Moreover, asking one's spouse to move to a random city is usually not optimal for their career. It's even worse when both are academics (the 'two-body-problem'). The odds of both people finding a job in the same city are . . . not great.
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We test these predictions with econometrics. Since the 'credibility revolution', it's often survey or lab experiments, or else ‘quasi-experiments’. Then there's text-as-data, eye tracking, geospatial methods . . . the arms race goes on. If you want to publish well, tool up.
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It's expensive to pack up your stuff and say goodbye to your friends, both personally and financially, even for single people but much more so for families with kids.
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2. Expectations of mobility
Beggars can't be choosers, and most junior scholars need to take whatever job they can get. This effectively means throwing a dartboard at the map and moving wherever it sticks, often more than once, before landing a stable position.
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Theories use methodological individualism and game-theoretic logic to deduce individual behavior, by writing down a utility function and using math to derive an individual's incentives and how they interact with others to produce aggregate behavior.
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In any case, it’s been great to have so many conversations and collaborations during my time in academia, and I look forward to keeping in touch. (n/n)
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To have a chance on the market, you need to publish and publish, so everyone is frantically submitting papers. Journals have not grown commensurately, so the acceptance rate at 'good' journals is typically in the single digits. Most papers get rejected before being published.
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1. Conditions of scarcity
It was driven home to me from the very start of grad school that there are not enough jobs to go around. The academic job market has always been tight, but it got much worse after the budget cuts from the 2008 recession, and worse again with covid.
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A typical outcome is that ppl spend several cycles on the market, facing repeated rejection, and taking temporary position(s) before finding a stable job. Each temporary position implies moving cities, with all the accompanying financial and personal costs.
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Moving is among the most stressful experiences for children, and many young academics have to do it more than once. I've known several people whose kids were depressed, anxious or bullied as a result of changing towns and schools.
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Rather, there are three broad factors in academic poli sci whose interaction led me to find other opportunities. I'll call these conditions of scarcity, expectations of mobility, and epistemological misalignment. To take them in turn:
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I'll start by saying that I can't complain about how I, as an individual, have fared in academia. As a grad student, I was supported by my advisors and broader department, and as a postdoc, I had plenty of autonomy and opportunities.
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We know about the problems with 'researcher degrees of freedom'/p-hacking, replicability, and external validity. Efforts to address these include ever-stricter standards for pre-registration and replication, and heroic efforts to repeat the same studies in multiple contexts.
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At a recent conference dinner, the ppl at my table included one person working in city A and living in city B, one working in B & living in A, one working in C & living in A, and someone living & working in A but whose spouse was in D (with A, B, C, D all 100's of km apart).
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Impressed that the Norwegian rental car comes with studded snow tires. Where I'm from, we approach winter driving with the dubious combo of blind optimism and bald all-seasons.
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Just estimated my own ideal point using the "tweetscores" R package. Apparently I'm not far off from the median Senate Republican.
Not a great estimate, because my follows are not always based on homophily (as the pkg assumes), but often on a sense of morbid curiosity.
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I thought it would be interesting to look at the actual shape of population density, and how it changes as you move away from the city center. How different are, eg, NYC and LA?
Here's the population density of some American cities, plotted against distance from city hall: 🧵
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In response to safety concerns from parents, the city has banned car traffic in front of my kid's school at dropoff time. 👍👍👍
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Looking forward to presenting next week at KU
@CPH_SODAS
! Thanks for the invitation
@HjalmarCarlsen
&
@fmerhout
Join us next friday were we will be hosting:
@NataliaUmansky
with the presentation
Spreading like wildfire: The securitization of the Amazon rainforest fires on Twitter
&
@JeremySpater
with
Measuring Segregation and Individual Outgroup Exposure: The k-Nearest-Neighbors Metric
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@ProfHansNoel
I'm on the market! Postdoc
@PUPolitics
and
@BobstCenter
. I focus on the political economy of space and ethnicity, with empirical applications to India. Defended
@DukePoliSci
August 2019. More at
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Great article!
ICYMI: Interested in contact or context effects? Here's how to think about the two. Plus, where the field is headed next. New
@AnnualReviews
w/
@noahlnathan
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What have they done to the Twitter algorithm? As of the last couple days, my feed is full of bar fights, softcore porn, and right-wing conspiracy theories. Maybe a misguided effort to increase engagement? Please revert!
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When will there be a phone/watch that can plug in a monitor/keyboard/mouse and run desktop applications like RStudio, Chrome, LaTeX, MS Office, etc? To save us from lugging laptops to the office
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From Dems, more calls for half-measures like "expanded background checks". Can't we start talking about real legislation to end the routine purchase and mass ownership of handguns & assault rifles, along the lines of Canada, UK, or Australia? (1/2)
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Great example of social science working for the public interest
The Queen has named me Knight of the Order of Dannebrog for an "extensive contribution on a very central post" during the pandemic.
I am proud & thankful to have served society & science in this critical period. It would not have been possible without the help of so many. (1/2)
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I think community-based review is a particularly interesting idea: transparent, open-ended, iterative
In this article, we discuss the current issues of academia and scientific publishing, describing its possible future transformations.
BTW, it came out of our posts/comments on LinkedIn between Sergei (
@Sergei_Imaging
) and myself.
#AcademicTwitter
#science
#research
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@fhollenbach
@torewig
@_alice_evans
I agree it's zoning, per postwar high-modernist urban planning. Separation of uses was considered more "scientific" and thought to ⬆️ land values. Done thru urban renewal, which facilitated racial segregation. Combination of bad science, efforts to increase revenue, and racism
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It would be very good to reform scientific education to reflect the understanding that scientific facts are formed & smoothed like driftwood by a long process of disputation, rather than emerging fully formed from somebody's head (or lab). I just wonder if it would . . .
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@CameronJJJ
"Some Pentagon officials were taken aback that German officials were publicly admitting the link between the Abrams tanks and the Leopards.... He added that officials had thought those communications would only be internal."
Wonder what was going on here?
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@bethiamswellman
@apcg
@elisabethjwood
@dshyde
@lorenlandau
@acrowinghen
@YalePoliSci
@BobstCenter
@WilliamsCollege
@ACMSWits
Congrats!! Well deserved
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Easy precautions like ventilation, air filtration, and voluntary masking in crowded places or when sick, should be the norm. Building standards should account for airborne virus transmission. Pandemics are the rule, not the exception. Covid's not over, and the next one will come.
Recent estimates are that 40% of people dying in USA of covid are vaccinated (vaccines reduce your risk of death, but the issue is that SO MANY people are catching covid because we gave up on masks, ventilation, & other protections). 3/
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From the right, calls to “harden the targets” by locking the doors, adding yet more cops, and turning teachers into armed guards. Maybe a crackdown on "red flag" kids (guess who). Streamlining the school to prison pipeline by turning the school into a prison. (2/2)
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I introduce a method for using geocoded survey locations to measure the inter-ethnic exposure of individuals, and validate it using network data. It's easy to implement and might be useful for others. (3/3)
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These people are crazy! That water is COLD! What kind of masochist would do this!?
Just kidding, sort of. I would probably do it again
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Going back over my old international economics textbook while writing an IPE paper, I ran into a pretty remarkable argument in defense of "environmental dumping" (concentration of polluting industries in certain, usually low-income, countries):
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I've been saying for awhile that I wanted to try winter swimming in the Øresund; people say that it's good for you, gives a new perspective, etc. I tried it this morning, and I've got to say . . .
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@RasmussenMagnus
@JensJungblut
Looks like they switched to summer tires a little too soon . . .
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@RasmussenMagnus
Lower take-up in liberal welfare states, where benefits are meant to be a bit punitive, and there's means-testing & other admin hurdles?
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The discussion among US economists about the student debt writedown, where we can watch practitioners trying to map and police the border between objective and subjective, between positive and normative, btw science and advocacy, is fascinating from philo of sci standpoint
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I appreciate the attention to urban land use in the
#IPCC
AR6 WG3 summary. Drives home that housing policy is multi-dimensional: it affects interclass & intergenerational distribution, ethnic contact, and climate impact all at once.
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Seems more likely that in many cases, the people regulating pollution (or not) and capturing the economic rents are not the same people who are breathing the smoke.
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Heaven help me, I just bought (a tiny amount of) Bitcoin. And my "investment" is already up 10%, hooray!
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I included C'bus because I'm from there and always been struck by how empty the downtown is. You can really see it in the data; the population density has a pronounced dip at radius 0. As you can see from google maps, downtown is dominated by parking lots and office buildings.
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NYC city hall for comparison :)
Just thought this was an interesting exercise. I bet the 1st derivative of pop. density, wrt distance, is related to pub. goods, segregation, car dependence, Dem vote share...
code:
data:
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Interesting claim that there's not enough work on 'state capacity', here meaning the state's ability to efficiently complete public projects. Maybe true? Most of the PE lit that comes to mind defines state cap'y as TAX cap'y, not, eg, $/km of rail
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@nils_weidmann
Very cool. I'm curious how you carried your stuff. Did you fit everything in the saddle bag?
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I'm old enough to remember when Theresa May said "There is no magic money tree". Apparently this elusive flora has finally been discovered, and has been put to good use financing regressive tax cuts.
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Same thing for LA; the population density dips at the center, and you can see why below.
You really get a sense of LA's sprawl from the plot: once you get to 20 miles from the center, LA actually has higher density than NYC or Boston at that distance.
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What can you say about a "currency" that doesn't hold value and can't be used for transactions?
Yet plenty of people want it for some reason, and not all of them are criminals
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