Bryan Caplan

To get anywhere new, you need to step off the treadmill

Before tenure, most academics need to publish their work in peer-reviewed journals if they want to keep their jobs. After tenure, most can publish their work anywhere or nowhere and still keep their jobs. This is a dramatic change in incentives, and you’d think it would lead to dramatic changes in behavior, particularly in a field like economics that studies incentives. In some ways it does- most professors spend less time on research after tenure. But if they do keep doing research, it is generally the same kind they did before- it seems surprisingly rare for economists to change what kind of research they do in response to their changed incentives.

On Monday the President of Providence College told me I’ve been promoted to tenured Associate Professor. I spent much of the last 10 years focused on publishing the 26 academic articles that got me here. So now I’m wondering, what do I change when freed from constraints? I’m planning a pivot toward higher-risk, longer time-horizon, potentially higher-reward research:

Different venues– publish things where people will read them, not where its most prestigious. More white papers, working papers, open access. More blog posts and popular articles, more books– not everything needs to be a peer-reviewed academic paper.

Different topics and methods– focus on work that might have policy impact even if it doesn’t publish well. Do more replications, forecasting and related work that moves us toward being a real science that establishes real truths, even if it doesn’t publish well and might anger some people. Make a point of posting data and code publicly so that its easy for others to use.

New skills– develop generalist skills or a 2nd specialty, ideally in a young/developing field like metascience or superforecasting. Breakthroughs are more likely to come that way, especially for someone not at the top of their 1st field. Create slack so that when big opportunities or needs arise, I’m not “too busy” working on old articles to do anything about it (like I was with Covid in February 2020, Bitcoin mining in 2011, et c). Of course, many of the directions I’m considering (prediction markets, consulting, angel investing, hanging around the state house) might never be “research” even if they do pan out.

The GMU economists are good role models here, though they are such outliers now that people don’t realize they often started their careers focused on publishing journal articles (admittedly some weird ones). For instance, Bryan Caplan’s first book came out 4 years after he got tenure. I’d like to hear more examples of people whose research changed for the better after tenure if you have them. I’d also like to hear about the projects you wish someone not concerned about career risk would take on.

I’m happy to be an Associate Professor at Providence College. While I wouldn’t mind hitting some higher rungs of the academic career/prestige ladder (full professor, endowed chair, NBER invitations, et c), I don’t view these as incentives strong enough to distort my choices the way needing to get a job and get tenure did. Now the goal is simply to do the best work I’m capable of, as I see it. As you can tell I’m pulled in a lot of different directions about what this will look like, but I hope that within 5 years it will be clear I’m doing quality work beyond standard applied microeconomics I’ve been exclusively focused on till now. If not, you’ll have this post to hold over me.

“I consider the “wasting of tenure” to be one of the aesthetic crimes one can commit with a wealthy life, and yet I see it all the time” –Tyler Cowen

Being a professor is still great, but the alternatives are getting better fast.

I’m glad I started a PhD in 2009; I wanted to learn more economics and the opportunity cost was low, with the worst job market in a generation. When I went on the job market in 2013, I still thought academia was such a clear favorite that I didn’t even apply to private-sector or government jobs. I wanted to teach, yes, but above all I wanted freedom- the freedom to choose my own research topics, to think deeply, to not have a boss, to not spend 40+ hours every week in an office.

It’s easy to find essays about how academic jobs are terrible, or at least much worse than they used to be. To me, being a tenure-track academic is still great work if you can get it, for all the reasons Bryan Caplan explains here. But I do think the quality of the job is standing still while the alternatives get better. The academic superiority that seemed obvious to me in 2009 and 2013 no longer seems obvious in 2021, due to three big changes:

Higher Demand: The demand for workers with quantitative and/or programming abilities has never been higher. My impression is that now anyone with the ability to do a PhD in a quantitative subject could be making six figures in tech, data science, or finance within a few years if they set their mind to it. Of course, this is simply a difference of degree; its always been the conventional wisdom that you could make more money outside of academia. The gap seems to be growing now, but to me the more important change is

Remote Work: Quality, high-paying remote jobs have gone from rare in 2019 to common today, which is a game-changer for many decisions, including academic vs non-academic. Perhaps the worst part of an academic career is that it forces everyone to move- getting a PhD usually requires moving, and getting your first academic job almost certainly does. This is a huge cost for those who value family and community, a cost many people are unwilling to pay. In 2014 my wife’s career had just brought us to New Orleans, but the closest tenure-track job offer I had was a thousand miles away at Creighton University in Omaha. I took the job and spent the next three years flying back and forth, partly because I wanted to be in academia, but partly because there were no good private sector or government options for an Econ PhD in New Orleans either at the time. Back then the private sector and government economist jobs were plentiful but generally meant moving to one of a few cities (DC, NYC, SF, Boston) and spending all day in an office, so I ignored them. Today I wouldn’t.

Campus vs The Internet: So the practical side of non-academic jobs is getting better, but what about the life of the mind? When I first went to college I loved taking classes in new subjects and going to the events and seminars that were always happening on campus, and part of the appeal of being a professor was to be able to keep doing that. In graduate school I liked attending the seminars where visiting speakers would present their latest research, and hoped to get a job at research-oriented university where I could keep doing that. But these benefits of being on campus don’t seem so important anymore. Partly its that I feel too busy to take advantage of them; most of the time there’s a speaker on campus talking about something cool like a new translation of the Odyssey, I’m either catching up on work or home with my kids. But mostly the internet means this sort of thing is available to everyone all the time. I may have missed Emily Wilson’s talk at my campus but I heard her on Conversations with Tyler. I’m not at an R1 school with scholars in my field presenting new research every month, but there are now more great research seminars online than I have time to watch. The Internet makes it increasingly easy for anyone with the motivation to participate in the life of the mind regardless of where they live or what their job is- certainly as consumers, and in a future post I’ll highlight the increasingly impressive scholarly production coming from non-academics.