University of Edinburgh

Reflections at the crossroads

PNRJ critique of neoclassical economics, experimental economics, inequality, personal, science and academia , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Jan 21 JDN 2460332

When this post goes live, I will have just passed my 36th birthday. (That means I’ve lived for about 1.1 billion seconds, so in order to be as rich as Elon Musk, I’d need to have made, on average, since birth, $200 per second—$720,000 per hour.)

I certainly feel a lot better turning 36 than I did 35. I don’t have any particular additional accomplishments to point to, but my life has already changed quite a bit, in just that one year: Most importantly, I quit my job at the University of Edinburgh, and I am currently in the process of moving out of the UK and back home to Michigan. (We moved the cat over Christmas, and the movers have already come and taken most of our things away; it’s really just us and our luggage now.)

But I still don’t know how to field the question that people have been asking me since I announced my decision to do this months ago:

“What’s next?”

I’m at a crossroads now, trying to determine which path to take. Actually maybe it’s more like a roundabout; it has a whole bunch of different paths, surely not just two or three. The road straight ahead is labeled “stay in academia”; the others at the roundabout are things like “freelance writing”, “software programming”, “consulting”, and “tabletop game publishing”. There’s one well-paved and superficially enticing road that I’m fairly sure I don’t want to take, labeled “corporate finance”.

Right now, I’m just kind of driving around in circles.

Most people don’t seem to quit their jobs without a clear plan for where they will go next. Often they wait until they have another offer in hand that they intend to take. But when I realized just how miserable that job was making me, I made the—perhaps bold, perhaps courageous, perhaps foolish—decision to get out as soon as I possibly could.

It’s still hard for me to fully understand why working at Edinburgh made me so miserable. Many features of an academic career are very appealing to me. I love teaching, I like doing research; I like the relatively flexible hours (and kinda need them, because of my migraines).

I often construct formal decision models to help me make big choices—generally it’s a linear model, where I simply rate each option by its relative quality in a particular dimension, then try different weightings of all the different dimensions. I’ve used this successfully to pick out cars, laptops, even universities. I’m not entrusting my decisions to an algorithm; I often find myself tweaking the parameters to try to get a particular result—but that in itself tells me what I really want, deep down. (Don’t do that in research—people do, and it’s bad—but if the goal is to make yourself happy, your gut feelings are important too.)

My decision models consistently rank university teaching quite high. It generally only gets beaten by freelance writing—which means that maybe I should give freelance writing another try after all.

And yet, my actual experience at Edinburgh was miserable.

What went wrong?

Well, first of all, I should acknowledge that when I separate out the job “university professor” into teaching and research as separate jobs in my decision model, and include all that goes into both jobs—not just the actual teaching, but the grading and administrative tasks; not just doing the research, but also trying to fund and publish it—they both drop lower on the list, and research drops down a lot.

Also, I would rate them both even lower now, having more direct experience of just how awful the exam-grading, grant-writing and journal-submitting can be.

Designing and then grading an exam was tremendously stressful: I knew that many of my students’ futures rested on how they did on exams like this (especially in the UK system, where exams are absurdly overweighted! In most of my classes, the final exam was at least 60% of the grade!). I struggled mightily to make the exam as fair as I could, all the while knowing that it would never really feel fair and I didn’t even have the time to make it the best it could be. You really can’t assess how well someone understands an entire subject in a multiple-choice exam designed to take 90 minutes. It’s impossible.

The worst part of research for me was the rejection.

I mentioned in a previous post how I am hypersensitive to rejection; applying for grants and submitting to journals was clearly the worst feelings of rejection I’ve felt in any job. It felt like they were evaluting not only the value of my work, but my worth as a scientist. Failure felt like being told that my entire career was a waste of time.

It was even worse than the feeling of rejection in freelance writing (which is one of the few things that my model tells me is bad about freelancing as a career for me, along with relatively low and uncertain income). I think the difference is that a book publisher is saying “We don’t think we can sell it.”—’we’ and ‘sell’ being vital. They aren’t saying “this is a bad book; it shouldn’t exist; writing it was a waste of time.”; they’re just saying “It’s not a subgenre we generally work with.” or “We don’t think it’s what the market wants right now.” or even “I personally don’t care for it.”. They acknowledge their own subjective perspective and the fact that it’s ultimately dependent on forecasting the whims of an extremely fickle marketplace. They aren’t really judging my book, and they certainly aren’t judging me.

But in research publishing, it was different. Yes, it’s all in very polite language, thoroughly spiced with sophisticated jargon (though some reviewers are more tactful than others). But when your grant application gets rejected by a funding agency or your paper gets rejected by a journal, the sense really basically is “This project is not worth doing.”; “This isn’t good science.”; “It was/would be a waste of time and money.”; “This (theory or experiment you’ve spent years working on) isn’t interesting or important.” Nobody ever came out and said those things, nor did they come out and say “You’re a bad economist and you should feel bad.”; but honestly a couple of the reviews did kinda read to me like they wanted to say that. They thought that the whole idea that human beings care about each other is fundamentally stupid and naive and not worth talking about, much less running experiments on.

It isn’t so much that I believed them that my work was bad science. I did make some mistakes along the way (but nothing vital; I’ve seen far worse errors by Nobel Laureates). I didn’t have very large samples (because every person I add to the experiment is money I have to pay, and therefore funding I have to come up with). But overall I do believe that my work is sufficiently rigorous to be worth publishing in scientific journals.

It’s more that I came to feel that my work is considered bad, that the kind of work I wanted to do would forever be an uphill battle against an implacable enemy. I already feel exhausted by that battle, and it had only barely begun. I had thought that behavioral economics was a more successful paradigm by now, that it had largely displaced the neoclassical assumptions that came before it; but I was wrong. Except specifically in journals dedicated to experimental and behavioral economics (of which prestigious journals are few—I quickly exhausted them), it really felt like a lot of the feedback I was getting amounted to, “I refuse to believe your paradigm.”.

Part of the problem, also, was that there simply aren’t that many prestigious journals, and they don’t take that many papers. The top 5 journals—which, for whatever reason, command far more respect than any other journals among economists—each accept only about 5-10% of their submissions. Surely more than that are worth publishing; and, to be fair, much of what they reject probably gets published later somewhere else. But it makes a shockingly large difference in your career how many “top 5s” you have; other publications almost don’t matter at all. So once you don’t get into any of those (which of course I didn’t), should you even bother trying to publish somewhere else?

And what else almost doesn’t matter? Your teaching. As long as you show up to class and grade your exams on time (and don’t, like, break the law or something), research universities basically don’t seem to care how good a teacher you are. That was certainly my experience at Edinburgh. (Honestly even their responses to professors sexually abusing their students are pretty unimpressive.)

Some of the other faculty cared, I could tell; there were even some attempts to build a community of colleagues to support each other in improving teaching. But the administration seemed almost actively opposed to it; they didn’t offer any funding to support the program—they wouldn’t even buy us pizza at the meetings, the sort of thing I had as an undergrad for my activist groups—and they wanted to take the time we spent in such pedagogy meetings out of our grading time (probably because if they didn’t, they’d either have to give us less grading, or some of us would be over our allotted hours and they’d owe us compensation).

And honestly, it is teaching that I consider the higher calling.

The difference between 0 people knowing something and 1 knowing it is called research; the difference between 1 person knowing it and 8 billion knowing it is called education.

Yes, of course, research is important. But if all the research suddenly stopped, our civilization would stagnate at its current level of technology, but otherwise continue unimpaired. (Frankly it might spare us the cyberpunk dystopia/AI apocalypse we seem to be hurtling rapidly toward.) Whereas if all education suddenly stopped, our civilization would slowly decline until it ultimately collapsed into the Stone Age. (Actually it might even be worse than that; even Stone Age cultures pass on knowledge to their children, just not through formal teaching. If you include all the ways parents teach their children, it may be literally true that humans cannot survive without education.)

Yet research universities seem to get all of their prestige from their research, not their teaching, and prestige is the thing they absolutely value above all else, so they devote the vast majority of their energy toward valuing and supporting research rather than teaching. In many ways, the administrators seem to see teaching as an obligation, as something they have to do in order to make money that they can spend on what they really care about, which is research.

As such, they are always making classes bigger and bigger, trying to squeeze out more tuition dollars (well, in this case, pounds) from the same number of faculty contact hours. It becomes impossible to get to know all of your students, much less give them all sufficient individual attention. At Edinburgh they even had the gall to refer to their seminars as “tutorials” when they typically had 20+ students. (That is not tutoring!)And then of course there were the lectures, which often had over 200 students.

I suppose it could be worse: It could be athletics they spend all their money on, like most Big Ten universities. (The University of Michigan actually seems to strike a pretty good balance: they are certainly not hurting for athletic funding, but they also devote sizeable chunks of their budget to research, medicine, and yes, even teaching. And unlike virtually all other varsity athletic programs, University of Michigan athletics turns a profit!)

If all the varsity athletics in the world suddenly disappeared… I’m not convinced we’d be any worse off, actually. We’d lose a source of entertainment, but it could probably be easily replaced by, say, Netflix. And universities could re-focus their efforts on academics, instead of acting like a free training and selection system for the pro leagues. The University of California, Irvine certainly seemed no worse off for its lack of varsity football. (Though I admit it felt a bit strange, even to a consummate nerd like me, to have a varsity League of Legends team.)

They keep making the experience of teaching worse and worse, even as they cut faculty salaries and make our jobs more and more precarious.

That might be what really made me most miserable, knowing how expendable I was to the university. If I hadn’t quit when I did, I would have been out after another semester anyway, and going through this same process a bit later. It wasn’t even that I was denied tenure; it was never on the table in the first place. And perhaps because they knew I wouldn’t stay anyway, they didn’t invest anything in mentoring or supporting me. Ostensibly I was supposed to be assigned a faculty mentor immediately; I know the first semester was crazy because of COVID, but after two and a half years I still didn’t have one. (I had a small research budget, which they reduced in the second year; that was about all the support I got. I used it—once.)

So if I do continue on that “academia” road, I’m going to need to do a lot of things differently. I’m not going to put up with a lot of things that I did. I’ll demand a long-term position—if not tenure-track, at least renewable indefinitely, like a lecturer position (as it is in the US, where the tenure-track position is called “assistant professor” and “lecturer” is permanent but not tenured; in the UK, “lecturers” are tenure-track—except at Oxford, and as of 2021, Cambridge—just to confuse you). Above all, I’ll only be applying to schools that actually have some track record for valuing teaching and supporting their faculty.

And if I can’t find any such positions? Then I just won’t apply at all. I’m not going in with the “I’ll take what I can get” mentality I had last time. Our household finances are stable enough that I can afford to wait awhile.

But maybe I won’t even do that. Maybe I’ll take a different path entirely.

For now, I just don’t know.

Knowing When to Quit

PNRJ current events, personal, science and academia , , , , , , , , , ,

Sep 10 JDN 2460198

At the time of writing this post, I have officially submitted my letter of resignation at the University of Edinburgh. I’m giving them an entire semester of notice, so I won’t actually be leaving until December. But I have committed to my decision now, and that feels momentous.

Since my position here was temporary to begin with, I’m actually only leaving a semester early. Part of me wanted to try to stick it out, continue for that one last semester and leave on better terms. Until I sent that letter, I had that option. Now I don’t, and I feel a strange mix of emotions: Relief that I have finally made the decision, regret that it came to this, doubt about what comes next, and—above all—profound ambivalence.

Maybe it’s the very act of quitting—giving up, being a quitter—that feels bad. Even knowing that I need to get out of here, it hurts to have to be the one to quit.

Our society prizes grit and perseverance. Since I was a child I have been taught that these are virtues. And to some extent, they are; there certainly is such a thing as giving up too quickly.

But there is also such a thing as not knowing when to quit. Sometimes things really aren’t going according to plan, and you need to quit before you waste even more time and effort. And I think I am like Randall Monroe in this regard; I am more inclined to stay when I shouldn’t than quit when I shouldn’t:

Sometimes quitting isn’t even as permanent as it is made out to be. In many cases, you can go back later and try again when you are better prepared.

In my case, I am unlikely to ever work at the University of Edinburgh again, but I haven’t yet given up on ever having a career in academia. Then again, I am by no means as certain as I once was that academia is the right path for me. I will definitely be searching for other options.

There is a reason we are so enthusiastically sold on the virtue of perseverance. Part of how our society sells the false narrative of meritocracy is by claiming that people who succeed did so because they tried harder or kept on trying.

This is not entirely false; all other things equal, you are more likely to succeed if you keep on trying. But in some ways that just makes it more seductive and insidious.

For the real reason most people hit home runs in life is they were born on third base. The vast majority of success in life is determined by circumstances entirely outside individual control.


Even having the resources to keep trying is not guaranteed for everyone. I remember a great post on social media pointing out that entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games:

Entrepreneurship is like one of those carnival games where you throw darts or something.

Middle class kids can afford one throw. Most miss. A few hit the target and get a small prize. A very few hit the center bullseye and get a bigger prize. Rags to riches! The American Dream lives on.

Rich kids can afford many throws. If they want to, they can try over and over and over again until they hit something and feel good about themselves. Some keep going until they hit the center bullseye, then they give speeches or write blog posts about ‘meritocracy’ and the salutary effects of hard work.

Poor kids aren’t visiting the carnival. They’re the ones working it.

The odds of succeeding on any given attempt are slim—but you can always pay for more tries. A middle-class person can afford to try once; mostly those attempts will fail, but a few will succeed and then go on to talk about how their brilliant talent and hard work made the difference. A rich person can try as many times as they like, and when they finally succeed, they can credit their success to perseverance and a willingness to take risks. But the truth is, they didn’t have any exceptional reserves of grit or courage; they just had exceptional reserves of money.

In my case, I was not depleting money (if anything, I’m probably losing out financially by leaving early, though that very much depends on how the job market goes for me): It was something far more valuable. I was whittling away at my own mental health, depleting my energy, draining my motivation. The resource I was exhausting was my very soul.

I still have trouble articulating why it has been so painful for me to work here. It’s so hard to point to anything in particular.

The most obvious downsides were things I knew at the start: The position is temporary, the pay is mediocre, and I had to move across the Atlantic and live thousands of miles from home. And I had already heard plenty about the publish-or-perish system of research publication.

Other things seem like minor annoyances: They never did give me a good office (I have to share it with too many people, and there isn’t enough space, so in fact I rarely use it at all). They were supposed to assign me a faculty mentor and never did. They kept rearranging my class schedule and not telling me things until immediately beforehand.

I think what it really comes down to is I didn’t realize how much it would hurt. I knew that I was moving across the Atlantic—but I didn’t know how isolated and misunderstood I would feel when I did. I knew that publish-or-perish was a problem—but I didn’t know how agonizing it would be for me in particular. I knew I probably wouldn’t get very good mentorship from the other faculty—but I didn’t realize just how bad it would be, or how desperately I would need that support I didn’t get.

I either underestimated the severity of these problems, or overestimated my own resilience. I thought I knew what I was going into, and I thought I could take it. But I was wrong. I couldn’t take it. It was tearing me apart. My only answer was to leave.

So, leave I shall. I have now committed to doing so.

I don’t know what comes next. I don’t even know if I’ve made the right choice. Perhaps I’ll never truly know. But I made the choice, and now I have to live with it.

I’m old enough to be President now.

PNRJ current events, personal, science and academia , , , , , ,

Jan 22 JDN 2459967

When this post goes live, I will have passed my 35th birthday. This is old enough to be President of the United States, at least by law. (In practice, no POTUS has been less than 42.)

Not that I will ever be President. I have neither the wealth nor the charisma to run any kind of national political campaign. I might be able to get elected to some kind of local office at some point, like a school board or a city water authority. But I’ve been eligible to run for such offices for quite awhile now, and haven’t done so; nor do I feel particularly inclined at the moment.

No, the reason this birthday feels so significant is the milestone it represents. By this age, most people have spouses, children, careers. I have a spouse. I don’t have kids. I sort of have a career.

I have a job, certainly. I work for relatively decent pay. Not excellent, not what I was hoping for with a PhD in economics, but enough to live on (anywhere but an overpriced coastal metropolis). But I can’t really call that job a career, because I find large portions of it unbearable and I have absolutely no job security. In fact, I have the exact opposite: My job came with an explicit termination date from the start. (Do the people who come up with these short-term postdoc positions understand how that feels? It doesn’t seem like they do.)

I missed the window to apply for academic jobs that start next year. If I were happy here, this would be fine; I still have another year left on my contract. But I’m not happy here, and that is a grievous understatement. Working here is clearly the most important situational factor contributing to my ongoing depression. So I really ought to be applying to every alternative opportunity I can find—but I can’t find the will to try it, or the self-confidence to believe that my attempts could succeed if I did.

Then again, I’m not sure I should be applying to academic positions at all. If I did apply to academic positions, they’d probably be teaching-focused ones, since that’s the one part of my job I’m actually any good at. I’ve more or less written off applying to major research institutions; I don’t think I would get hired anyway, and even if I did, the pressure to publish is so unbearable that I think I’d be just as miserable there as I am here.

On the other hand, I can’t be sure that I would be so miserable even at another research institution; maybe with better mentoring and better administration I could be happy and successful in academic research after all.

The truth is, I really don’t know how much of my misery is due to academia in general, versus the British academic system, versus Edinburgh as an institution, versus starting work during the pandemic, versus the experience of being untenured faculty, versus simply my own particular situation. I don’t know if working at another school would be dramatically better, a little better, or just the same. (If it were somehow worse—which frankly seems hard to arrange—I would literally just quit immediately.)

I guess if the University of Michigan offered me an assistant professor job right now, I would take it. But I’m confident enough that they wouldn’t offer it to me that I can’t see the point in applying. (Besides, I missed the application windows this year.) And I’m not even sure that I would be happy there, despite the fact that just a few years ago I would have called it a dream job.

That’s really what I feel most acutely about turning 35: The shattering of dreams.

I thought I had some idea of how my life would go. I thought I knew what I wanted. I thought I knew what would make me happy.

The weirdest part it that it isn’t even that different from how I’d imagined it. If you’d asked me 10 or even 20 years ago what my career would be like at 35, I probably would have correctly predicted that I would have a PhD and be working at a major research university. 10 years ago I would have correctly expected it to be a PhD in economics; 20, I probably would have guessed physics. In both cases I probably would have thought I’d be tenured by now, or at least on the tenure track. But a postdoc or adjunct position (this is sort of both?) wouldn’t have been utterly shocking, just vaguely disappointing.

The biggest error by my past self was thinking that I’d be happy and successful in this career, instead of barely, desperately hanging on. I thought I’d have published multiple successful papers by now, and be excited to work on a new one. I imagined I’d also have published a book or two. (The fact that I self-published a nonfiction book at 16 but haven’t published any nonfiction ever since would be particularly baffling to my 15-year-old self, and is particularly depressing to me now.) I imagined myself becoming gradually recognized as an authority in my field, not languishing in obscurity; I imagined myself feeling successful and satisfied, not hopeless and depressed.

It’s like the dark Mirror Universe version of my dream job. It’s so close to what I thought I wanted, but it’s also all wrong. I finally get to touch my dreams, and they shatter in my hands.

When you are young, birthdays are a sincere cause for celebration; you look forward to the new opportunities the future will bring you. I seem to be now at the age where it no longer feels that way.