profit

Where is the money going in academia?

pnrj core principles, critique of neoclassical economics, inequality, personal, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Feb 19 JDN 2459995

A quandary for you:

My salary is £41,000.

Annual tuition for a full-time full-fee student in my department is £23,000.

I teach roughly the equivalent of one full-time course (about 1/2 of one and 1/4 of two others; this is typically counted as “teaching 3 courses”, but if I used that figure, it would underestimate the number of faculty needed).

Each student takes about 5 or 6 courses at a time.

Why do I have 200 students?

If you multiply this out, the 200 students I teach, divided by the 6 instructors they have at one time, times the £23,000 they are paying… I should be bringing in over £760,000 for the university. Why am I paid only 5% of that?

Granted, there are other costs a university must bear aside from paying instructors. There are facilities, and administration, and services. And most of my students are not full-fee paying; that £23,000 figure really only applies to international students.

Students from Scotland pay only £1,820, but there aren’t very many of them, and public funding is supposed to make up that difference. Even students from the rest of the UK pay £9,250. And surely the average tuition paid has got to be close to that? Yet if we multiply that out, £9,000 times 200 divided by 6, we’re still looking at £300,000. So I’m still getting only 14%.

Where is the rest going?

This isn’t specific to my university by any means. It seems to be a global phenomenon. The best data on this seems to be from the US.

According to salary.com, the median salary for an adjunct professor in the US is about $63,000. This actually sounds high, given what I’ve heard from other entry-level faculty. But okay, let’s take that as our figure. (My pay is below this average, though how much depends upon the strength of the pound against the dollar. Currently the pound is weak, so quite a bit.)

Yet average tuition for out-of-state students at public college is $23,000 per year.

This means that an adjunct professor in the US with 200 students takes in $760,000 but receives $63,000. Where does that other $700,000 go?

If you think that it’s just a matter of paying for buildings, service staff, and other costs of running a university, consider this: It wasn’t always this way.

Since 1970, inflation-adjusted salaries for US academic faculty at public universities have risen a paltry 3.1%. In other words, basically not at all.

This is considerably slower than the growth of real median household income, which has risen almost 40% in that same time.

Over the same interval, nominal tuition has risen by over 2000%; adjusted for inflation, this is a still-staggering increase of 250%.

In other words, over the last 50 years, college has gotten three times as expensive, but faculty are still paid basically the same. Where is all this extra money going?

Part of the explanation is that public funding for colleges has fallen over time, and higher tuition partly makes up the difference. But private school tuition has risen just as fast, and their faculty salaries haven’t kept up either.

In their annual budget report, the University of Edinburgh proudly declares that their income increased by 9% last year. Let me assure you, my salary did not. (In fact, inflation-adjusted, my salary went down.) And their EBITDA—earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization—was £168 million. Of that, £92 million was lost to interest and depreciation, but they don’t pay taxes at all, so their real net income was about £76 million. In the report, they include price changes of their endowment and pension funds to try to make this number look smaller, ending up with only £37 million, but that’s basically fiction; these are just stock market price drops, and they will bounce back.

Using similar financial alchemy, they’ve been trying to cut our pensions lately, because they say they “are too expensive” (because the stock market went down—nevermind that it’ll bounce back in a year or two). Fortunately, the unions are fighting this pretty hard. I wish they’d also fight harder to make them put people like me on the tenure track.

Had that £76 million been distributed evenly between all 5,000 of us faculty, we’d each get an extra £15,600.

Well, then, that solves part of the mystery in perhaps the most obvious, corrupt way possible: They’re literally just hoarding it.

And Edinburgh is far from the worst offender here. No, that would be Harvard, who are sitting on over $50 billion in assets. Since they have 21,000 students, that is over $2 million per student. With even a moderate return on its endowment, Harvard wouldn’t need to charge tuition at all.

But even then, raising my salary to £56,000 wouldn’t explain why I need to teach 200 students. Even that is still only 19% of the £300,000 those students are bringing in. But hey, then at least the primary service for which those students are here for might actually account for one-fifth of what they’re paying!

Now let’s considers administrators. Median salary for a university administrator in the US is about $138,000—twice what adjunct professors make.


Since 1970, that same time interval when faculty salaries were rising a pitiful 3% and tuition was rising a staggering 250%, how much did chancellors’ salaries increase? Over 60%.

Of course, the number of administrators is not fixed. You might imagine that with technology allowing us to automate a lot of administrative tasks, the number of administrators could be reduced over time. If that’s what you thought happened, you would be very, very wrong. The number of university administrators in the US has more than doubled since the 1980s. This is far faster growth than the number of students—and quite frankly, why should the number of administrators even grow with the number of students? There is a clear economy of scale here, yet it doesn’t seem to matter.

Combine those two facts: 60% higher pay times twice as many administrators means that universities now spend at least 3 times as much on administration as they did 50 years ago. (Why, that’s just about the proportional increase in tuition! Coincidence? I think not.)

Edinburgh isn’t even so bad in this regard. They have 6,000 administrative staff versus 5,000 faculty. If that already sounds crazy—more admins than instructors?—consider that the University of Michigan has 7,000 faculty but 19,000 administrators.

Michigan is hardly exceptional in this regard: Illinois UC has 2,500 faculty but nearly 8,000 administrators, while Ohio State has 7,300 faculty and 27,000 administrators. UCLA is even worse, with only 4,000 faculty but 26,000 administrators—a ratio of 6 to 1. It’s not the UC system in general, though: My (other?) alma mater of UC Irvine somehow supports 5,600 faculty with only 6,400 administrators. Yes, that’s right; compared to UCLA, UCI has 40% more faculty but 76% fewer administrators. (As far as students? UCLA has 47,000 while UCI has 36,000.)

At last, I think we’ve solved the mystery! Where is all the money in academia going? Administrators.

They keep hiring more and more of them, and paying them higher and higher salaries. Meanwhile, they stop hiring tenure-track faculty and replace them with adjuncts that they can get away with paying less. And then, whatever they manage to save that way, they just squirrel away into the endowment.

A common right-wing talking point is that more institutions should be “run like a business”. Well, universities seem to have taken that to heart. Overpay your managers, underpay your actual workers, and pocket the savings.

Capitalism can be fair

pnrj core principles, ethics , , , , , ,

Aug 22 JDN 2459449

There are certainly extreme right-wing libertarians who seem to think that capitalism is inherently fair, or that “fairness” is meaningless and (some very carefully defined notion of) liberty is the only moral standard. I am not one of them. I agree that many of the actual practices of modern capitalism as we know it are unfair, particularly in the treatment of low-skill workers.

But lately I’ve been seeing a weirdly frequent left-wing take—Marxist take, really—that goes to the opposite extreme, saying that capitalism is inherently unfair, that the mere fact that capital owners ever get any profit on anything is proof that the system is exploitative and unjust and must be eliminated.

So I decided it would be worthwhile to provide a brief illustration of how, at least in the best circumstances, a capitalist system of labor can in fact be fair and just.

The argument that capitalism is inherently unjust seems to be based on the notion that profit means “workers are paid less than their labor is worth”. I think that the reason this argument is so insidious is that it’s true in one sense—but not true in another. Workers are indeed paid less than the total surplus of their actual output—but, crucially, they are not paid less than what the surplus of their output would have been had the capital owner not provided capital and coordination.

Suppose that we are making some sort of product. To make it more concrete, let’s say shirts. You can make a shirt by hand, but it’s a lot of work, and it takes a long time. Suppose that you, working on your own by hand, can make 1 shirt per day. You can sell each shirt for $10, so you get $10 per day.

Then, suppose that someone comes along who owns looms and sewing machines. They gather you and several other shirt-makers and offer to let you use their machines, in exchange for some of the revenue. With the aid of 9 other workers and the machines, you are able to make 30 shirts per day. You can still sell each shirt for $10, so now there is total revenue of $300.

Whether or not this is fair depends on precisely the bargain that was struck with the owner of the machines. Suppose that he asked for 40% of the revenue. Then the 10 workers including yourself would get (0.60)($300) = $180 to split, presumably evenly, and each get $18 per day. This seems fair; you’re clearly better off than you were making shirts by yourself. The capital owner then gets (0.40)($300) = $120, which is more than each of you, but not by a ridiculous amount; and he probably has costs to deal with in maintaining those machines.

But suppose instead the owner had demanded 80% of the revenue; then you would have to split (0.20)($300) = $60 between you, and each would only get $6 per day. The capital owner would then get (0.80)($300) = $240, 40 times as much as each of you.

Or perhaps instead of a revenue-sharing agreement, the owner offers to pay you a wage. If that wage is $18 per day, it seems fair. If it is $6 per day, it seems obviously unfair.

If this owner is the only employer, then he is competing only with working alone. So we would expect him to offer a wage of $10 per day, or maybe slightly more since working with the machines may be harder or more unpleasant than working by hand.

But if there are many employers, then he is now competing with those employers as well. If he offers $10, someone else might offer $12, and a third might offer $15. Competition should drive the system toward an equilibrium where workers are getting paid their marginal value product—in other words, the wage for one hour of work should equal the additional value added by one more hour of work.

In the case that seems fair, where workers are getting more money than they would have on their own, are they getting paid “less than the value of their labor”? In one sense, yes; the total surplus is not going all to the workers, but is being shared with the owner of the machines. But the more important sense is whether they’d be better off quitting and working on their own—and they obviously would not be.

What value does the capital owner provide? Well, the capital, of course. It’s their property and they are letting other people use it. Also, they incur costs to maintain it.

Of course, it matters how the capital owner obtained that capital. If they are an inventor who made it themselves, it seems obviously just that they should own it. If they inherited it or got lucky on the stock market, it isn’t something they deserve in a deep sense, but it’s reasonable to say they are entitled to it. But if the only reason they have the capital is by theft, fraud, or exploitation, then obviously they don’t deserve it. In practice, there are very few of the first category, a huge number of the second, and all too many of the third. Yet this is not inherent to the capitalist work arrangement. Many capital owners don’t deserve what they own; but those who do have a right to make a profit letting other people use their property.

There are of course many additional complexities that arise in the real world, in terms of market power, bargaining, asymmetric information, externalities, and so on. I freely admit that in practice, capitalism is often unfair. But I think it’s worth pointing out that the mere existence of profit from capital ownership is not inherently unjust, and in fact by organizing our economy around it we have managed to achieve unprecedented prosperity.

Why the Republican candidates like flat income tax—and we really, really don’t

pnrj critique of neoclassical economics, public policy , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

JDN 2456160 EDT 13:55.

The Republican Party is scrambling to find viable Presidential candidates for next year’s election. The Democrats only have two major contenders: Hillary Clinton looks like the front-runner (and will obviously have the most funding), but Bernie Sanders is doing surprisingly well, and is particularly refreshing because he is running purely on his principles and ideas. He has no significant connections, no family dynasty (unlike Jeb Bush and, again, Hillary Clinton) and not a huge amount of wealth (Bernie’s net wealth is about $500,000, making him comfortably upper-middle class; compare to Hillary’s $21.5 million and her husband’s $80 million); but he has ideas that resonate with people. Bernie Sanders is what politics is supposed to be. Clinton’s campaign will certainly raise more than his; but he has already raised over $4 million, and if he makes it to about $10 million studies suggest that additional spending above that point is largely negligible. He actually has a decent chance of winning, and if he did it would be a very good sign for the future of America.

But the Republican field is a good deal more contentious, and the 19 candidates currently running have been scrambling to prove that they are the most right-wing in order to impress far-right primary voters. (When the general election comes around, whoever wins will of course pivot back toward the center, changing from, say, outright fascism to something more like reactionism or neo-feudalism. If you were hoping they’d pivot so far back as to actually be sensible center-right capitalists, think again; Hillary Clinton is the only one who will take that role, and they’ll go out of their way to disagree with her in every way they possibly can, much as they’ve done with Obama.) One of the ways that Republicans are hoping to prove their right-wing credentials is by proposing a flat income tax and eliminating the IRS.

Unlike most of their proposals, I can see why many people think this actually sounds like a good idea. It would certainly dramatically reduce bureaucracy, and that’s obviously worthwhile since excess bureaucracy is pure deadweight loss. (A surprising number of economists seem to forget that government does other things besides create excess bureaucracy, but I must admit it does in fact create excess bureaucracy.)

Though if they actually made the flat tax rate 20% or even—I can’t believe this is seriously being proposed—10%, there is no way the federal government would have enough revenue. The only options would be (1) massive increases in national debt (2) total collapse of government services—including their beloved military, mind you, or (3) directly linking the Federal Reserve quantitative easing program to fiscal policy and funding the deficit with printed money. Of these, 3 might not actually be that bad (it would probably trigger some inflation, but actually we could use that right now), but it’s extremely unlikely to happen, particularly under Republicans. In reality, after getting a taste of 2, we’d clearly end up with 1. And then they’d be complaining about the debt and clamor for more spending cuts, more spending cuts, ever more spending cuts, but there would simply be no way to run a functioning government on 10% of GDP in anything like our current system. Maybe you could do it on 20%—maybe—but we currently spend more like 35%, and that’s already a very low amount of spending for a First World country. The UK is more typical at 47%, while Germany is a bit low at 44%; Sweden spends 52% and France spends a whopping 57%. Anyone who suggests we cut government spending from 35% to 20% needs to explain which 3/7 of government services are going to immediately disappear—not to mention which 3/7 of government employees are going to be immediately laid off.

And then they want to add investment deductions; in general investment deductions are a good thing, as long as you tie them to actual investments in genuinely useful things like factories and computer servers. (Or better yet, schools, research labs, or maglev lines, but private companies almost never invest in that sort of thing, so the deduction wouldn’t apply.) The kernel of truth in the otherwise ridiculous argument that we should never tax capital is that taxing real investment would definitely be harmful in the long run. As I discussed with Miles Kimball (a cognitive economist at Michigan and fellow econ-blogger I hope to work with at some point), we could minimize the distortionary effects of corporate taxes by establishing a strong deduction for real investment, and this would allow us to redistribute some of this enormous wealth inequality without dramatically harming economic growth.

But if you deduct things that aren’t actually investments—like stock speculation and derivatives arbitrage—then you reduce your revenue dramatically and don’t actually incentivize genuinely useful investments. This is the problem with our current system, in which GE can pay no corporate income tax on $108 billion in annual profit—and you know they weren’t using all that for genuinely productive investment activities. But then, if you create a strong enforcement system for ensuring it is real investment, you need bureaucracy—which is exactly what the flat tax was claimed to remove. At the very least, the idea of eliminating the IRS remains ridiculous if you have any significant deductions.

Thus, the benefits of a flat income tax are minimal if not outright illusory; and the costs, oh, the costs are horrible. In order to have remotely reasonable amounts of revenue, you’d need to dramatically raise taxes on the majority of people, while significantly lowering them on the rich. You would create a direct transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich, increasing our already enormous income inequality and driving millions of people into poverty.

Thus, it would be difficult to more clearly demonstrate that you care only about the interests of the top 1% than to propose a flat income tax. I guess Mitt Romney’s 47% rant actually takes the cake on that one though (Yes, all those freeloading… soldiers… and children… and old people?).

Many Republicans are insisting that a flat tax would create a surge of economic growth, but that’s simply not how macroeconomics works. If you steeply raise taxes on the majority of people while cutting them on the rich, you’ll see consumer spending plummet and the entire economy will be driven into recession. Rich people simply don’t spend their money in the same way as the rest of us, and the functioning of the economy depends upon a continuous flow of spending. There is a standard neoclassical economic argument about how reducing spending and increasing saving would lead to increased investment and greater prosperity—but that model basically assumes that we have a fixed amount of stuff we’re either using up or making more stuff with, which is simply not how money works; as James Kroeger cogently explains on his blog “Nontrivial Pursuits”, money is created as it is needed; investment isn’t determined by people saving what they don’t spend. Indeed, increased consumption generally leads to increased investment, because our economy is currently limited by demand, not supply. We could build a lot more stuff, if only people could afford to buy it.

And that’s not even considering the labor incentives; as I already talked about in my previous post on progressive taxation, there are two incentives involved when you increase someone’s hourly wage. On the one hand, they get paid more for each hour, which is a reason to work; that’s the substitution effect. But on the other hand, they have more money in general, which is a reason they don’t need to work; that’s the income effect. Broadly speaking, the substitution effect dominates at low incomes (about $20,000 or less), the income effect dominates at high incomes (about $100,000 or more), and the two effects cancel out at moderate incomes. Since a tax on your income hits you in much the same way as a reduction in your wage, this means that raising taxes on the poor makes them work less, while raising taxes on the rich makes them work more. But if you go from our currently slightly-progressive system to a flat system, you raise taxes on the poor and cut them on the rich, which would mean that the poor would work less, and the rich would also work less! This would reduce economic output even further. If you want to maximize the incentive to work, you want progressive taxes, not flat taxes.

Flat taxes sound appealing because they are so simple; even the basic formula for our current tax rates is complicated, and we combine it with hundreds of pages of deductions and credits—not to mention tens of thousands of pages of case law!—making it a huge morass of bureaucracy that barely anyone really understands and corporate lawyers can easily exploit. I’m all in favor of getting rid of that; but you don’t need a flat tax to do that. You can fit the formula for a progressive tax on a single page—indeed, on a single line: r = 1 – I^-p

That’s it. It’s simple enough to be plugged into any calculator that is capable of exponents, not to mention efficiently implemented in Microsoft Excel (more efficiently than our current system in fact).

Combined with that simple formula, you could list all of the sensible deductions on a couple of additional pages (business investments and educational expenses, mostly—poverty should be addressed by a basic income, not by tax deductions on things like heating and housing, which are actually indirect corporate subsidies), along with a land tax (one line: $3000 per hectare), a basic income (one more line: $8,000 per adult and $4,000 per child), and some additional excise taxes on goods with negative externalities (like alcohol, tobacco, oil, coal, and lead), with a line for each; then you can provide a supplementary manual of maybe 50 pages explaining the detailed rules for applying each of those deductions in unusual cases. The entire tax code should be readable by an ordinary person in a single sitting no longer than a few hours. That means no more than 100 pages and no more than a 7th-grade reading level.

Why do I say this? Isn’t that a ridiculous standard? No, it is a Constitutional imperative. It is a fundamental violation of your liberty to tax you according to rules you cannot reasonably understand—indeed, bordering on Kafkaesque. While this isn’t taxation without representation—we do vote for representatives, after all—it is something very much like it; what good is the ability to change rules if you don’t even understand the rules in the first place? Nor would it be all that difficult: You first deduct these things from your income, then plug the result into this formula.

So yes, I absolutely agree with the basic principle of tax reform. The tax code should be scrapped and recreated from scratch, and the final product should be a primary form of only a few pages combined with a supplementary manual of no more than 100 pages. But you don’t need a flat tax to do that, and indeed for many other reasons a flat tax is a terrible idea, particularly if the suggested rate is 10% or 15%, less than half what we actually spend. The real question is why so many Republican candidates think that this will appeal to their voter base—and why they could actually be right about that.

Part of it is the entirely justified outrage at the complexity of our current tax system, and the appealing simplicity of a flat tax. Part of it is the long history of American hatred of taxes; we were founded upon resisting taxes, and we’ve been resisting taxes ever since. In some ways this is healthy; taxes per se are not a good thing, they are a bad thing, a necessary evil.

But those two things alone cannot explain why anyone would advocate raising taxes on the poorest half of the population while dramatically cutting them on the top 1%. If you are opposed to taxes in general, you’d cut them on everyone; and if you recognize the necessity of taxation, you’d be trying to find ways to minimize the harm while ensuring sufficient tax revenue, which in general means progressive taxation.

To understand why they would be pushing so hard for flat taxes, I think we need to say that many Republicans, particularly those in positions of power, honestly do think that rich people are better than poor people and we should always give more to the rich and less to the poor. (Maybe it’s partly halo effect, in which good begets good and bad begets bad? Or maybe just world theory, the ingrained belief that the world is as it ought to be?)

Romney’s 47% rant wasn’t an exception; it was what he honestly believes, what he says when he doesn’t know he’s on camera. He thinks that he earned every penny of his $250 million net wealth; yes, even the part he got from marrying his wife and the part he got from abusing tax laws, arbitraging assets and liquidating companies. He thinks that people who live on $4,000 or even $400 a year are simply lazy freeloaders, who could easily work harder, perhaps do some arbitrage and liquidation of their own (check out these alleged “rags to riches” stories including the line “tried his hand at mortgage brokering”), but choose not to, and as a result deserve what they get. (It’s important to realize just how bizarre this moral attitude truly is; even if I thought you were the laziest person on Earth, I wouldn’t let you starve to death.) He thinks that the social welfare programs which have reduced poverty but never managed to eliminate it are too generous—if he even thinks they should exist at all. And in thinking these things, he is not some bizarre aberration; he is representing an entire class of people, nearly all of whom vote Republican.

The good news is, these people are still in the minority. They hold significant sway over the Republican primary, but will not have nearly as much impact in the general election. And right now, the Republican candidates are so numerous and so awful that I have trouble seeing how the Democrats could possibly lose. (But please, don’t take that as a challenge, you guys.)