Thursday, November 29, 2018

I like the conclusion but cannot be blind to the fact that the data supporting the conclusion is anemic

Deeply skeptical of self-selected, self-report online survey results. But otherwise it fits priors, so lazily willing to consider it supportive. From Why do academics oppose the market? A test of Nozick’s hypothesis by Raul Magni-Berton and Diego RĂ­os

From the Abstract:
In this article, the authors explore why academics tend to oppose the market. To this intent the article uses normative political theory as an explanatory mechanism, starting with a conjecture originally suggested by Robert Nozick. Academics are over-represented amongst the best students of their cohort. School achievement engenders high expectations about future economic prospects. Yet markets are only contingently sensitive to school achievement. This misalignment between schools and markets is perceived by academics – and arguably by intellectuals in general – as morally unacceptable. To test this explanation, the article uses an online questionnaire with close to 1500 French academic respondents. The data resulting from this investigation lend support to Nozick’s hypothesis.
A different way of putting it: Academics spend the first 20 years of their lives in an environment which rewards a narrow range of human attributes such as IQ and diligence. The market-place rewards a much broader range or human attributes including grit, risk taking, time discounting, openness, talent-stacking, etc. At forty, the best of those who excelled in academia in the first twenty years and then stayed in academia for the next twenty years, are at a markedly lower sociological level of achievement (SES, income, wealth accumulation, mate choice, etc.) than the best of those who did well in academia and then did well in the market.

They accord their own lack of achievement to the randomness and arbitrariness of the market rather than 1) poor decision optimization choices on their own part and 2) the narrowness of their own range of capabilities.

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