The Oil Drum

89 comments on Turning an Oil Tanker

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PaulS on January 9, 2008 - 12:43pm

Incentive? What incentive?

Annual compensation for hourly jobs in the Big Three auto industry: $145,000 ; annual compensation for professors $93,000. On the whole, engineers in industry don't do any better than professors, as their jobs don't last long enough to vest the vast and lavish pension benefits which form a big part of compensation at the Big Three, government, and, often, academia. Oh, and they don't get overtime, and, in some industries, their travel is not so much to academic conferences at resorts in Bermuda and Hawai'i as it is to worksites in torrid deserts in summer, or frigid Arctic wastes in winter.

Oh, and I was forgetting, auto workers start earning four to ten years earlier than college grads, and they do so free of crippling college debt.

Things have not changed one iota since I knew a somewhat demoralized guy in grad school who saw his friends from his auto-industry town already ensconced in luxurious houses, owning big cars and boats, and so on, while we were still in, well, college-style housing. Nor since a relative living temporarily in northeast Wisconsin was agog at the way folks there showed no ambition beyond the local paper mill, as that paid much more than they expected to net by getting a higher education.

The comments at the link tell me there is zero likelihood of change in the foreseeable future. It's a sociopolitical issue independent of any diminishing of opportunities that might be caused by oil and energy issues. It follows that as someone here mentioned, the goods and technologies and alt-energies will continue to appear by magic, "poof", from elsewhere. How else should they appear?

That is, they will appear until they don't. Or until the dollar has tanked so far that it no longer matters to "us" whether they do or don't.

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ericy on January 9, 2008 - 4:42pm

In addition to this, the professors that I know in Physics all complain about the hassles of raising funding for research. There are little dibs and dabs of money here and there, and if you write enough grant proposals, you eventually get enough to hold together a program. Of course you spend all of your time writing proposals and dealing with performance reviews...

Which brings me to a 2nd point. The supply & demand dynamic for PhDs doesn't work well. Each professor takes as many students as he can get funding for, but there is no guarantee of a job for those that graduate. Essentially the only thing that regulates the number of students is a difficulty in attracting the students in the first place (because kids eventually figure out that the field isn't as lucrative as one might have thought in the first place), and of course the availability (or lack of) research funding.

Colleges and universities are trying to reduce the number of tenured faculty positions - they want to hire people for a teaching stint of a couple of years, and then send them on their way to their next posting. They become in effect highly educated migrant workers, but people reach a stage in their lives where they want to settle down and so forth, and this sort of transient life eventually gets very old. For those that want an academic research career, you end up with multiple post-doc appointments, and then perhaps you get a proper permanent job of some sort.

For those who have an insatiable curiosity, the professor's job sounds a lot more interesting despite all of the drawbacks that you noted, but if you add too much administrative BS, people would be more inclined to just take the money.

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wkwillis on January 10, 2008 - 2:43am

Liebig minimum for plants might be water, sunlight, nitrogen, sulfur, potash, etc.
What's the Liebig minimum for technology? Research money, Engineering money, Inventor money...
Say, we took one billion dollars out of the hundred billion we spend on research each year and gave 1,000 inventors 1,000 to 1,000,000 dollars each, reserving half for administration, what results would we get? What inventions would get the prize money?