It is pretty well-established that the American academic community is disproportionately of the Left, and in fact tilts pretty strongly in many cases to the far Left / progressive side. People debate a lot about why this should be, but I think one contributing factor (but certainly not the only one) that I have never heard anyone discuss is the zero-sum game these academics must play in their own careers. I think that many of them incorrectly assume that all professions, and all of the economy and capitalism, is dominated by this same dog-eat-dog zero sum-game — remember, for most, academia is the only industry they have ever experienced from the inside. And once you assume that the whole economy is zero-sum, it is small step from there to overly-narrow focus on distribution of wealth and income.
One of the mistakes folks on the Left make about capitalism is to describe capitalism as mostly about competition. In fact, capitalism is mostly about cooperation, it’s a self-organizing process where people who don’t even know each other cooperate to deliver products and services, facilitated by markets and the magic of prices. Sure, competition exists but it is not the fundamental feature, but an enabler that makes sure the cooperation occurs as efficiently as possible. Capitalism in fact is about zillions of voluntary trades and transactions every day that each make both parties better off — or else both sides would not have agreed to it. Capitalism in fact is a giant positive sum game, a fact that many on the Left simply do not grasp.
Warren Meyer, “Does the Zero-Sum Nature of Academic Success Contribute to the Left-wards Bias of Academia?”, Coyote Blog, 2018-11-09.
May 29, 2021
QotD: Academia and capitalism
Comments Off on QotD: Academia and capitalism
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
