Month: June 2021

Responsible business owners support regulations

PNRJ ethics, market failure, public policy , , , ,

Jun 27 JDN 2459373

In last week’s post I explained why business owners so consistently overestimate the harms of regulations: In short, they ignore the difference between imposing a rule on a single competitor and imposing that same rule on all competitors equally. The former would be disastrous; the latter is often inconsequential.

In this follow-up post I’m going to explain why ethical, responsible business owners should want many types of regulation—and that in fact if they were already trying to behave ethically and responsibly, regulations can make them more profitable in doing so.

Let’s use an extreme example just to make things clear. Suppose you are running a factory building widgets, you are competing with several other factories, and you find out that some of the other factories are using slave labor in their production.

What would be the best thing for you to do? In terms of maximizing profit, you’ve really got two possible approaches: You could start using slaves yourself, or you could find a way to stop the other factories from using slaves. If you are even remotely a decent human being, you will choose the latter. How can you do that? By supporting regulations.

By lobbying your government to ban slavery—or, if it’s already banned, to enforce those laws more effectively—you can free the workers enslaved by the other factories while also increasing your own profits. This is a very big win-win. (I guess it’s not a Pareto improvement, because the factory owners who were using slaves are probably worse off—but it’s hard to feel bad for them.)

Slavery is an extreme example (but sadly not an unrealistic one), but a similar principle applies to many other cases. If you are a business owner who wants to be environmentally responsible, you should support regulations on pollution—because you’re already trying to comply with them, so imposing them on your competitors who aren’t will give you an advantage. If you are a business owner who wants to pay high wages, you should support increasing minimum wage. Whatever socially responsible activities you already do, you have an economic incentive to make them mandatory for other companies.

Voluntary social responsibility sounds nice in theory, but in a highly competitive market it’s actually very difficult to sustain. I don’t doubt that many owners of sweatshops would like to pay their workers better, but they know they’d have to raise their prices a bit in order to afford it, and then they would get outcompeted and might even have to shut down. So any individual sweatshop owner really doesn’t have much choice: Either you meet the prevailing market price, or you go out of business. (The multinationals who buy from them, however, have plenty of market power and massive profits. They absolutely could afford to change their supply chain practices to support factories that pay their workers better.) Thus the best thing for them to do would be to support a higher minimum wage that would apply to their competitors as well.

Consumer pressure can provide some space for voluntary social responsibility, if customers are willing to pay more for products made by socially responsible companies. But people often don’t seem willing to pay all that much, and even when they are, it can be very difficult for consumers to really know which companies are being responsible (this is particular true for environmental sustainability: hence the widespread practice of greenwashing). In order for consumer pressure to work, you need a critical mass of a large number of consumers who are all sufficiently committed and well-informed. Regulation can often accomplish the same goals much more reliably.

In fact, there’s some risk that businesses could lobby for too many regulations, because they are more interested in undermining their competition than they are about being socially responsible. If you have lots of idiosyncratic business practices, it could be in your best interest to make those practices mandatory even if they have no particular benefits—simply because you were already doing them, and so the cost of transitioning to them will fall entirely on your competitors.


Regarding publicly-traded corporations in particular, there’s another reason why socially responsible CEOs would want regulations: Shareholders. If you’re trying to be socially responsible but it’s cutting into your profits, your shareholders may retaliate by devaluing your stock, firing you, or even suing you—as Dodge sued Ford in 1919 for the “crime” of making wages too high and prices too low. But if there are regulations that require you to be socially responsible, your shareholders can’t really complain; you’re simply complying with the law. In this case you wouldn’t want to be too vocal about supporting the regulations (since your shareholders might object to that); but you would, in fact, support them.

Market competition is a very cutthroat game, and both the prizes for winning and the penalties for losing are substantial. Regulations are what decides the rules of that game. If there’s a particular way that you want to play—either because it has benefits for the rest of society, or simply because it’s your preference—it is advantageous for you to get that written into the rules that everyone needs to follow.

Why business owners are always so wrong about regulations

PNRJ heuristics and biases, market failure, public policy , , , , , , ,

Jun 20 JDN 2459386

Minimum wage. Environmental regulations. Worker safety. Even bans on child slavery.No matter what the regulation is, it seems that businesses will always oppose it, always warn that these new regulations will destroy their business and leave thousands out of work—and always be utterly, completely wrong.

In fact, the overall impact of US federal government regulations on employment is basically negligible, and the impact on GDP is very clearly positive. This really isn’t surprising if you think about it: Despite what some may have you believe, our government doesn’t go around randomly regulating things for no reason. The regulations we impose are specifically chosen because their benefits outweighed their costs, and the rigorous, nonpartisan analysis of our civil service is one of the best-kept secrets of American success and the envy of the world.

But when businesses are so consistently insistent that new regulations (of whatever kind, however minor or reasonable they may be) will inevitably destroy their industry—when such catastrophic outcomes have basically never occurred, that cries out for an explanation. How can such otherwise competent, experienced, knowledgeable people be always so utterly wrong about something so basic? These people are experts in what they do. Shouldn’t business owners know what would happen if we required them to raise wages a little, or require basic safety standards, or reduce pollution caps, or not allow their suppliers to enslave children?

Well, what do you mean by “them”? Herein lies the problem. There is a fundamental difference between what would happen if we required any specific business to comply with a new regulation (but left their competitors exempt), versus what happens if we require an entire industry to comply with that same regulation.

Business owners are accustomed to thinking in an open system, what economists call partial equilibrium: They think about how things will affect them specifically, and not how they will affect broader industries or the economy as a whole. If wages go up, they’ll lay off workers. If the price of their input goes down, they’ll buy more inputs and produce more outputs. They aren’t thinking about how these effects interact with one another at a systemic level, because they don’t have to.

This works because even a huge multinational corporation is only a small portion of the US economy, and doesn’t have much control over the system as a whole. So in general when a business tries to maximize its profit in partial equilibrium, it tends to get the right answer (at least as far as maximizing GDP goes).

But large-scale regulation is one time where we absolutely cannot do this. If we try to analyze federal regulations purely in partial equilibrium terms, we will be consistently and systematically wrong—as indeed business owners are.

If we went to a specific corporation and told them, “You must pay your workers $2 more per hour.”, what would happen? They would be forced to lay off workers. No doubt about it. If we specifically targeted one particular corporation and required them to raise their wages, they would be unable to compete with other businesses who had not been forced to comply. In fact, they really might go out of business completely. This is the panic that business owners are expressing when they warn that even really basic regulations like “You can’t dump toxic waste in our rivers” or “You must not force children to pick cocoa beans for you” will cause total economic collapse.

But when you regulate an entire industry in this way, no such dire outcomes happen. The competitors are also forced to comply, and so no businesses are given special advantages relative to one another. Maybe there’s some small reduction in employment or output as a result, but at least if the regulation is reasonably well-planned—as virtually all US federal regulations are, by extremely competent people—those effects will be much smaller than the benefits of safer workers, or cleaner water, or whatever was the reason for the regulation in the first place.

Think of it this way. Businesses are in a constant state of fierce, tight competition. So let’s consider a similarly tight competition such as the Olympics. The gold medal for the 100-meter sprint is typically won by someone who runs the whole distance in less than 10 seconds.

Suppose we had told one of the competitors: “You must wait an extra 3 seconds before starting.” If we did this to one specific runner, that runner would lose. With certainty. There has never been an Olympic 100-meter sprint where the first-place runner was more than 3 seconds faster than the second-place runner. So it is basically impossible for that runner to ever win the gold, simply because of that 3-second handicap. And if we imposed that constraint on some runners but not others, we would ensure that only runners without the handicap had any hope of winning the race.

But now suppose we had simply started the competition 3 seconds late. We had a minor technical issue with the starting gun, we fixed it in 3 seconds, and then everything went as normal. Basically no one would notice. The winner of the race would be the same as before, all the running times would be effectively the same. Things like this have almost certainly happened, perhaps dozens of times, and no one noticed or cared.

It’s the same 3-second delay, but the outcome is completely different.

The difference is simple but vital: Are you imposing this constraint on some competitors, or on all competitors? A constraint imposed on some competitors will be utterly catastrophic for those competitors. A constraint imposed on all competitors may be basically unnoticeable to all involved.

Now, with regulations it does get a bit more complicated than that: We typically can’t impose regulations on literally everyone, because there is no global federal government with the authority to do that. Even international human rights law, sadly, is not that well enforced. (International intellectual property lawvery nearly is—and that contrast itself says something truly appalling about our entire civilization.) But when regulation is imposed by a large entity like the United States (or even the State of California), it generally affects enough of the competitors—and competitors who already had major advantages to begin with, like the advanced infrastructure, impregnable national security, and educated population of the United States—that the effects on competition are, if not negligible, at least small enough to be outweighed by the benefits of the regulation.

So, whenever we propose a new regulation and business owners immediately panic about its catastrophic effects, we can safely ignore them. They do this every time, and they are always wrong.

But take heed: Economists are trained to think in terms of closed systems and general equilibrium. So if economists are worried about the outcome of a regulation, then there is legitimate reason to be concerned. It’s not that we know better how to run their businesses—we certainly don’t. Rather, we much better understand the difference between imposing a 3-second delay on a single runner versus simply starting the whole race 3 seconds later.

Could the Star Trek economy really work?

PNRJ futurism, inequality, macroeconomics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jun 13 JDN 2459379

“The economics of the future are somewhat different”, Jean-Luc Picard explains to Lily Sloane in Star Trek: First Contact.

Captain Picard’s explanation is not very thorough, and all we have about the economic system of the Federation comes from similar short glimpes across the various Star Trek films and TV series. The best glimpses of what the Earth’s economy is like largely come from the Picard series in particular.

But I think we can safely conclude that all of the following are true:

1. Energy is extraordinarily abundant, with a single individual having access to an energy scale that would rival the energy production of entire nations at present. By E=mc2, simply being able to teleport a human being or materialize a hamburger from raw energy, as seems to be routine in Starfleet, would require something on the order of 10^17 joules, or about 28 billion kilowatt-hours. The total energy supply of the world economy today is about 6*10^20 joules, or 100 trillion kilowatt-hours.

2. There is broad-based prosperity, but not absolute equality. At the very least different people live differently, though it is unclear whether anyone actually has a better standard of living than anyone else. The Picard family still seems to own their family vineyard that has been passed down for generations, and since the population of Earth is given as about 9 billion (a plausible but perhaps slightly low figure for our long-run stable population equilibrium), its acreage is large enough that clearly not everyone on Earth can own that much land.

3. Most resources that we currently think of as scarce are not scarce any longer. Replicator technology allows for the instantaneous production of food, clothing, raw materials, even sophisticated electronics. There is no longer a “manufacturing sector” as such; there are just replicators and people who use or program them. Most likely, even new replicators are made by replicating parts in other replicators and then assembling them. There are a few resources which remain scarce, such as dilithium (somehow involved in generating these massive quantities of energy) and latinum (a bizarre substance that is prized by many other cultures yet for unexplained reasons cannot be viably produced in replicators). Essentially everything else that is scarce is inherently so, such as front-row seats at concerts, original paintings, officer commissions in Starfleet, or land in San Francisco.

4. Interplanetary and even interstellar trade is routine. Starships with warp capability are available to both civilian and government institutions, and imports and exports can be made to planets dozens or even hundreds of light-years away as quickly as we can currently traverse the oceans with a container ship.

5. Money as we know it does not exist. People are not paid wages or salaries for their work. There is still some ownership of personal property, and particular families (including the Picards) seem to own land; but there does not appear to be any private ownership of capital. For that matter there doesn’t even appear to be be much in the way of capital; we never see any factories. There is obviously housing, there is infrastructure such as roads, public transit, and presumably power plants (very, very powerful power plants, see 1!), but that may be all. Nearly all manufacturing seems to be done by replicators, and what can’t be done by replicators (e.g. building new starships) seems to be all orchestrated by state-owned enterprises such as Starfleet.

Could such an economy actually work? Let’s stipulate that we really do manage to achieve such an extraordinary energy scale, millions of times more than what we can currently produce. Even very cheap, widespread nuclear energy would not be enough to make this plausible; we would need at least abundant antimatter, and quite likely something even more exotic than this, like zero point energy. Along this comes some horrifying risks—imagine an accident at a zero-point power plant that tears a hole in the fabric of space next to a major city, or a fanatical terrorist with a handheld 20-megaton antimatter bomb. But let’s assume we’ve found ways to manage those risks as well.

Furthermore, let’s stipulate that it’s possible to build replicators and warp drives and teleporters and all the similarly advanced technology that the Federation has, much of which is so radically advanced we can’t even be sure that such a thing is possible.

What I really want to ask is whether it’s possible to sustain a functional economy at this scale without money. George Roddenberry clearly seemed to think so. I am less convinced.

First of all, I want to acknowledge that there have been human societies which did not use money, or even any clear notion of a barter system. In fact, most human cultures for most of our history as a species allocated resources based on collective tribal ownership and personal favors. Some of the best parts of Debt: The First 5000 Years are about these different ways of allocating resources, which actually came much more naturally to us than money.

But there seem to have been rather harsh constraints on what sort of standard of living could be maintained in such societies. There was essentially zero technological advancement for thousands of years in most hunter-gatherer cultures, and even the wealthiest people in most of those societies overall had worse health, shorter lifespans, and far, far less access to goods and services than people we would consider in poverty today.

Then again, perhaps money is only needed to catalyze technological advancement; perhaps once you’ve already got all the technology you need, you can take money away and return to a better way of life without greed or inequality. That seems to be what Star Trek is claiming: That once we can make a sandwich or a jacket or a phone or even a car at the push of a button, we won’t need to worry about paying people because everyone can just have whatever they need.

Yet whatever they need is quite different from whatever they want, and therein lies the problem. Yes, I believe that with even moderate technological advancement—the sort of thing I expect to see in the next 50 years, not the next 300—we will have sufficient productivity that we could provide for the basic needs of every human being on Earth. A roof over your head, food on your table, clothes to wear, a doctor and a dentist to see twice a year, emergency services, running water, electricity, even Internet access and public transit—these are things we could feasibly provide to literally everyone with only about two or three times our current level of GDP, which means only about 2% annual economic growth for the next 50 years. Indeed, we could already provide them for every person in First World countries, and it is quite frankly appalling that we fail to do so.

However, most of us in the First World already live a good deal better than that. We don’t have the most basic housing possible, we have nice houses we want to live in. We don’t take buses everywhere, we own our own cars. We don’t eat the cheapest food that would provide adequate nutrition, we eat a wide variety of foods; we order pizza and Chinese takeout, and even eat at fancy restaurants on occasion. It’s less clear that we could provide this standard of living to everyone on Earth—but if economic growth continues long enough, maybe we can.

Worse, most of us would like to live even better than we do. My car is several years old right now, and it runs on gasoline; I’d very much like to upgrade to a brand-new electric car. My apartment is nice enough, but it’s quite small; I’d like to move to a larger place that would give me more space not only for daily living, but also for storage and for entertaining guests. I work comfortable hours for decent pay at a white-collar job that can be done entirely remotely on mostly my own schedule, but I’d prefer to take some time off and live independently while I focus more on my own writing. I sometimes enjoy cooking, but often it can be a chore, and sometimes I wish I could just go eat out at a nice restaurant for dinner every night. I don’t make all these changes because I can’t afford to—that is, because I don’t have the money.

Perhaps most of us would feel no need to have a billion dollars. I don’t really know what $100 billion actually gets you, as far as financial security, independence, or even consumption, that $50 million wouldn’t already. You can have total financial freedom and security with a middle-class American lifestyle with net wealth of about $2 million. If you want to also live in a mansion, drink Dom Perignon with every meal and drive a Lamborghini (which, quite frankly, I have no particular desire to do), you’ll need several million more—but even then you clearly don’t need $1 billion, let alone $100 billion. So there is indeed something pathological about wanting a billion dollars for yourself, and perhaps in the Federation they have mental health treatments for “wealth addiction” that prevent people from experiencing such pathological levels of greed.

Yet in fact, with the world as it stands, I would want a billion dollars. Not to own it. Not to let it sit and grow in some brokerage account. Not to simply be rich and be on the Forbes list. I couldn’t care less about those things. But with a billion dollars, I could donate enormous amounts to charities, saving thousands or even millions of lives. I could found my own institutions—research institutes, charitable foundations—and make my mark on the world. With $100 billion, I could make a serious stab at colonizing Mars—as Elon Musk seems to be doing, but most other billionaires have no particular interest in.

And it begins to strain credulity to imagine a world of such spectacular abundance that everyone could have enough to do that.

This is why I always struggle to answer when people ask me things like “If money were not object, how would you live your life?”; if money were no object, I’d end world hunger, cure cancer, and colonize the Solar System. Money is always an object. What I think you meant to ask was something much less ambitious, like “What would you do if you had a million dollars?” But I might actually have a million dollars someday—most likely by saving and investing the proceeds of a six-figure job as an economist over many years. (Save $2,000 per month for 20 years, growing it at 7% per year, and you’ll be over $1 million. You can do your own calculations here.) I doubt I’ll ever have $10 million, and I’m pretty sure I’ll never have $1 billion.

To be fair, it seems that many of the grand ambitions I would want to achieve with billions of dollars already are achieved by 23rd century; world hunger has definitely been ended, cancer seems to have been largely cured, and we have absolutely colonized the Solar System (and well beyond). But that doesn’t mean that new grand ambitions wouldn’t arise, and indeed I think they would. What if I wanted to command my own fleet of starships? What if I wanted a whole habitable planet to conduct experiments on, perhaps creating my own artificial ecosystem? The human imagination is capable of quite grand ambitions, and it’s unlikely that we could ever satisfy all of them for everyone.

Some things are just inherently scarce. I already mentioned some earlier: Original paintings, front-row seats, officer commissions, and above all, land. There’s only so much land that people want to live on, especially because people generally want to live near other people (Internet access could conceivably reduce the pressure for this, but, uh, so far it really hasn’t, so why would we think it will in 300 years?). Even if it’s true that people can have essentially arbitrary amounts of food, clothing, or electronics, the fact remains that there’s only so much real estate in San Francisco.

It would certainly help to build taller buildings, and presumably they would, though most of the depictions don’t really seem to show that; where are the 10-kilometer-tall skyscrapers made of some exotic alloy or held up by structural integrity fields? (Are the forces of NIMBY still too powerful?) But can everyone really have a 1000-square-meter apartment in the center of downtown? Maybe if you build tall enough? But you do still need to decide who gets the penthouse.

It’s possible that all inherently-scarce resources could be allocated by some mechanism other than money. Some even should be: Starfleet officer commissions are presumably allocated by merit. (Indeed, Starfleet seems implausibly good at selecting supremely competent officers.) Others could be: Concert tickets could be offered by lottery, and maybe people wouldn’t care so much about being in the real front row when you can always simulate the front row at home in your holodeck. Original paintings could all be placed in museums available for public access—and the tickets, too, could be allocated by lottery or simply first-come, first-served. (Picard mentions the Smithsonian, so public-access museums clearly still exist.)

Then there’s the question of how you get everyone to work, if you’re not paying them. Some jobs people will do for fun, or satisfaction, or duty, or prestige; it’s plausible that people would join Starfleet for free (I’m pretty sure I would). But can we really expect all jobs to work that way? Has automation reached such an advanced level that there are no menial jobs? Sanitation? Plumbing? Gardening? Paramedics? Police? People still seem to pick grapes by hand in the Picard vineyards; do they all do it for the satisfaction of a job well done? What happens if one day everyone decides they don’t feel like picking grapes today?

I certainly agree that most menial jobs are underpaid—most people do them because they can’t get better jobs. But surely we don’t want to preserve that? Surely we don’t want some sort of caste system that allocates people to work as plumbers or garbage collectors based on their birth? I guess we could use merit-based aptitude testing; it’s clear that the vast majority of people really aren’t cut out for Starfleet (indeed, perhaps I’m not!), and maybe some people really would be happiest working as janitors. But it’s really not at all clear what such a labor allocation system would be like. I guess if automation has reached such an advanced level that all the really necessary work is done by machines and human beings can just choose to work as they please, maybe that could work; it definitely seems like a very difficult system to manage.

So I guess it’s not completely out of the question that we could find some appropriate mechanism to allocate all goods and services without ever using money. But then my question becomes: Why? What do you have against money?

I understand hating inequality—indeed I share that feeling. I, too, am outraged by the existence of hectobillionaires in a world where people still die of malaria and malnutrition. But having a money system, or even a broadly free-market capitalist economy, doesn’t inherently have to mean allowing this absurd and appalling level of inequality. We could simply impose high, progressive taxes, redistribute wealth, and provide a generous basic income. If per-capita GDP is something like 100 times its current level (as it appears to be in Star Trek), then the basic income could be $1 million per year and still be entirely affordable.

That is, rather than trying to figure out how to design fair and efficient lotteries for tickets to concerts and museums, we could still charge for tickets, and just make sure that everyone has a million dollars a year in basic income. Instead of trying to find a way to convince people to clean bathrooms for free, we could just pay them to do it.

The taxes could even be so high at the upper brackets that they effectively impose a maximum income; say we have a 99% marginal rate above $20 million per year. Then the income inequality would collapse to quite a low level: No one below $1 million, essentially no one above $20 million. We could tax wealth as well, ensuring that even if people save or get lucky on the stock market (if we even still have a stock market—maybe that is unnecessary after all), they still can’t become hectobillionaires. But by still letting people use money and allowing some inequality, we’d still get all the efficiency gains of having a market economy (minus whatever deadweight loss such a tax system imposed—which I in fact suspect would not be nearly as large as most economists fear).

In all, I guess I am prepared to say that, given the assumption of such great feats of technological advancement, it is probably possible to sustain such a prosperous economy without the use of money. But why bother, when it’s so much easier to just have progressive taxes and a basic income?

When to give up

PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, current events, personal, science and academia , , , , , ,

Jun 6 JDN 2459372

Perseverance is widely regarded as a virtue, and for good reason. Often one of the most important deciding factors in success is the capacity to keep trying after repeated failure. I think this has been a major barrier for me personally; many things came easily to me when I was young, and I internalized the sense that if something doesn’t come easily, it must be beyond my reach.

Yet it’s also worth noting that this is not the only deciding factor—some things really are beyond our capabilities. Indeed, some things are outright impossible. And we often don’t know what is possible and what isn’t.

This raises the question: When should we persevere, and when should we give up?

There is actually reason to think that people often don’t give up when they should. Steven Levitt (of Freakonomics fame)recently published a study that asked people who were on the verge of a difficult decision to flip a coin, and then base their decision on the coin flip: Heads, make a change; tails, keep things as they are. Many didn’t actually follow the coin flip—but enough did that there was a statistical difference between those who saw heads and those who saw tails. The study found that the people who flipped heads and made a change were on average happier a couple of years later than the people who flipped tails and kept things as they were.

This question is particularly salient for me lately, because the academic job market has gone so poorly for me. I’ve spent most of my life believing that academia is where I belong; my intellect and my passion for teaching and research has convinced me and many others that this is the right path for me. But now that I have a taste of what it is actually like to apply for tenure-track jobs and submit papers to journals, I am utterly miserable. I hate every minute of it. I’ve spent the entire past year depressed and feeling like I have accomplished absolutely nothing.

In theory, once one actually gets tenure it’s supposed to get easier. But that could be a long way away—or it might never happen at all. As it is, there’s basically no chance I’ll get a tenure track position this year, and it’s unclear what my chances would be if I tried again next year.

If I could actually get a paper published, that would no doubt improve my odds of landing a better job next year. But I haven’t been able to do that, and each new rejection cuts so deep that I can barely stand to look at my papers anymore, much less actually continue submitting them. And apparently even tenured professors still get their papers rejected repeatedly, which means that this pain will never go away. I simply cannot imagine being happy if this is what I am expected to do for the rest of my life.

I found this list of criteria for when you should give up something—and most of them fit me. I’m not sure I know in my heart it can’t work out, but I increasingly suspect that. I’m not sure I want it anymore, now that I have a better idea of what it’s really like. Pursuing it is definitely making me utterly miserable. I wouldn’t say it’s the only reason, but I definitely do worry what other people will think if I quit; I feel like I’d be letting a lot of people down. I also wonder who I am without it, where I belong if not here. I don’t know what other paths are out there, but maybe there is something better. This constant stream of failure and rejection has definitely made me feel like I hate myself. And above all, when I imagine quitting, I absolutely feel an enormous sense of relief.

Publishing in journals seems to be the thing that successful academics care about most, and it means almost nothing to me anymore. I only want it because of all the pressure to have it, because of all the rewards that come from having it. It has become fully instrumental to me, with no intrinsic meaning or value. I have no particular desire to be lauded by the same system that lauded Fischer Black or Kenneth Rogoff—both of whose egregious and easily-avoidable mistakes are responsible for the suffering of millions people around the world.

I want people to read my ideas. But people don’t actually read journals. They skim them. They read the abstracts. They look at the graphs and regression tables. (You have the meeting that should have been an email? I raise you the paper that should have been a regression table.) They see if there’s something in there that they should be citing for their own work, and if there is, maybe then they actually read the paper—but everyone is so hyper-specialized that only a handful of people will ever actually want to cite any given paper. The vast majority of research papers are incredibly tedious to read and very few people actually bother. As a method for disseminating ideas, this is perhaps slightly better than standing on a street corner and shouting into a megaphone.

I would much rather write books; people sometimes actually read books, especially when they are written for a wide audience and hence not forced into the straitjacket of standard ‘scientific writing’ that no human being actually gets any enjoyment out of writing or reading. I’ve seen a pretty clear improvement in writing quality of papers written by Nobel laureates—after they get their Nobels or similar accolades. Once they establish themselves, they are free to actually write in ways that are compelling and interesting, rather than having to present everything in the most dry, tedious way possible. If your paper reads like something that a normal person would actually find interesting or enjoyable to read, you will be—as I have been—immediately told that you must remove all such dangerous flavor until the result is as tasteless as possible.

No, the purpose of research journals is not to share ideas. Its function is not to share, but to evaluate. And it isn’t even really to evaluate research—it’s to evaluate researchers. It’s to outsource the efforts of academic hiring to an utterly unaccountable and arbitrary system run mostly by for-profit corporations. It may have some secondary effect of evaluating ideas for validity; at least the really awful ideas are usually excluded. But its primary function is to decide the academic pecking order.

I had thought that scientific peer review was supposed to select for truth. Perhaps sometimes it does. It seems to do so reasonably well in the natural sciences, at least. But in the social sciences? That’s far less clear. Peer-reviewed papers are much more likely to be accurate than any randomly-selected content; but there are still a disturbingly large number of peer-reviewed published papers that are utterly wrong, and some unknown but undoubtedly vast number of good papers that have never seen the light of day.

Then again, when I imagine giving up on an academic career, I don’t just feel relief—I also feel regret and loss. I feel like I’ve wasted years of my life putting together a dream that has now crumbled in my hands. I even feel some anger, some sense that I was betrayed by those who told me that this was about doing good research when it turns out it’s actually about being thick-skinned enough that you can take an endless assault of rejections. It feels like I’ve been running a marathon, and I just rounded a curve to discover that the last five miles must be ridden on horseback, when I don’t have a horse, I have no equestrian training, and in fact I’m allergic to horses.

I wish someone had told me it would be like this. Maybe they tried and I didn’t listen. They did say that papers would get rejected. They did say that the tenure track was high-pressure and publish-or-perish was a major source of anxiety. But they never said that it would tear at my soul like this. They never said that I would have to go through multiple rounds of agony, self-doubt, and despair in order to get even the slighest recognition for my years of work. They never said that the whole field would treat me like I’m worthless because I can’t satisfy the arbitrary demands of a handful of anonymous reviewers. They never said that I would begin to feel worthless after several rounds of this.

That’s really what I want to give up on. I want to give up on hitching my financial security, my career, my future, my self-worth to a system as capricious as peer review.

I don’t want to give up on research. I don’t want to give up on teaching. I still believe strongly in discovering new truths and sharing them with others. I’m just increasingly realizing that academia isn’t nearly as good at that as I thought it was.

It isn’t even that I think it’s impossible for me to succeed in academia. I think that if I continued trying to get a tenure-track job, I would land one eventually. Maybe next year. Or maybe I’d spend a few years at a postdoc first. And I’d probably manage to publish some paper in some reasonably respectable journal at some point in the future. But I don’t know how long it would take, or how good a journal it would be—and I’m already past the point where I really don’t care anymore, where I can’t afford to care, where if I really allowed myself to care it would only devastate me when I inevitably fail again. Now that I see what is really involved in the process, how arduous and arbitrary it is, publishing in a journal means almost nothing to me. I want to be validated; I want to be appreciated; I want to be recognized. But the system is set up to provide nothing but rejection, rejection, rejection. If even the best work won’t be recognized immediately and even the worst work can make it with enough tries, then the whole system begins to seem meaningless. It’s just rolls of the dice. And I didn’t sign up to be a gambler.

The job market will probably be better next year than it was this year. But how much better? Yes, there will be more openings, but there will also be more applicants: Everyone who would normally be on the market, plus everyone like me who didn’t make it this year, plus everyone who decided to hold back this year because they knew they wouldn’t make it (as I probably should have done). Yes, in a normal year, I could be fairly confident of getting some reasonably decent position—but this wasn’t a normal year, and next year won’t be one either, and the one after that might still not be. If I can’t get a paper published in a good journal between now and then—and I’m increasingly convinced that I can’t—then I really can’t expect my odds to be greatly improved from what they were this time around. And if I don’t know that this terrible gauntlet is going to lead to something good, I’d really much rather avoid it altogether. It was miserable enough when I went into it being (over)confident that it would work out all right.

Perhaps the most important question when deciding whether to give up is this: What will happen if you do? What alternatives do you have? If giving up means dying, then don’t give up. (“Learn to let go” is very bad advice to someone hanging from the edge of a cliff.) But while it may feel that way sometimes, rarely does giving up on a career or a relationship or a project yield such catastrophic results.

When people are on the fence about making a change and then do so, even based on the flip of a coin, it usually makes them better off. Note that this is different from saying you should make all your decisions randomly; if you are confident that you don’t want to make a change, don’t make a change. This advice is for people who feel like they want a change but are afraid to take the chance, people who find themselves ambivalent about what direction to go next—people like me.

I don’t know where I should go next. I don’t know where I belong. I know it isn’t Wall Street. I’m pretty sure it’s not consulting. Maybe it’s nonprofits. Maybe it’s government. Maybe it’s freelance writing. Maybe it’s starting my own business. I guess I’d still consider working in academia; if Purdue called me back to say they made a terrible mistake and they want me after all, I’d probably take the offer. But since such an outcome is now vanishingly unlikely, perhaps it’s time, after all, to give up.