{"id":32414,"date":"2017-03-24T01:00:11","date_gmt":"2017-03-24T05:00:11","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=32414"},"modified":"2017-03-14T09:22:36","modified_gmt":"2017-03-14T13:22:36","slug":"qotd-academia-resembles-a-drug-gang","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2017\/03\/24\/qotd-academia-resembles-a-drug-gang\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Academia resembles a drug gang"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p>&#8230; both academia and drug gangs are marked by an endless supply of foot soldiers willing to work in terrible conditions for a small chance at living the good life. In drug gangs, the average street-corner dealer makes $3-something an hour; given that he\u2019s got a high chance of being arrested or shot, why doesn\u2019t he switch to McDonalds instead where the pay\u2019s twice as good and the environment\u2019s a lot safer? The article suggests one reason is because drug gangs offer the chance of eventually becoming a drug kingpin who is drowning in money.<\/p>\n<p>(I\u2019d worry they\u2019re exaggerating the importance of this factor compared to wanting to maintain street cred and McDonalds jobs being much more regimented both in the application process and performance, but they\u2019re the ones who have talked to anthropologists embedded in drug gangs, not me.)<\/p>\n<p>Academia has the same structure. TAs and grad students work in unpleasant conditions for much less than they could make in industry, because there\u2019s always the chance they could become a tenured professor who gets to live the life of the mind and travel to conferences in far-off countries and get summer vacations off.<\/p>\n<p>The article describes this structure as \u201cdualization\u201d \u2013 a field that separates neatly into a binary classification of winners and losers.<\/p>\n<p>Scott Alexander, <a href=\"http:\/\/slatestarcodex.com\/2015\/07\/28\/non-dual-awareness\/\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Non-Dual Awareness&#8221;, <em>Slate Star Codex<\/em><\/a>, 2015-07-28.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; both academia and drug gangs are marked by an endless supply of foot soldiers willing to work in terrible conditions for a small chance at living the good life. In drug gangs, the average street-corner dealer makes $3-something an hour; given that he\u2019s got a high chance of being arrested or shot, why doesn\u2019t [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[57,41,13],"tags":[119,112,764],"class_list":["post-32414","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humour","category-quotations","category-usa","tag-drugs","tag-organizedcrime","tag-university"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-8qO","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32414","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=32414"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32414\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":32415,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/32414\/revisions\/32415"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=32414"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=32414"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=32414"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}