by Jim Rose in F.A. Hayek, market efficiency, occupational choice, organisational economics, personnel economics Tags: academic bias, compensating differences, Hayek, intellectuals, Richard Posner, Robert Nozick, Schumpeter

The expansion of jobs for graduates from the 1960s onwards increased the choices for well-educated people more disposed to the market of working outside the teaching profession. Those left behind in academia were even more of the Leftist persuasion than earlier in the 20th century.

Dan Klein showed that in the hard sciences, there were 159 Democrats and 16 Republicans at UC-Berkley. Similar at Stanford. No registered Republicans in the sociology department and one each in the history and music departments. For UC-Berkeley, an overall Democrat:Republican ratio of 9.9:1. For Stanford, an overall D:R ratio of 7.6:1. Registered Democrats easily outnumber registered Republicans in most economics departments in the USA. The registered Democrat to Republican ratio in sociology departments is 44:1! For the humanities overall, only 10 to 1.

The left-wing bias of universities is no surprise, given Hayek’s 1948 analysis of intellectuals in light of opportunities available to people of varying talents:

exceptionally intelligent people who favour the market tend to find opportunities for professional and financial success outside the universities in the business or professional world; and

those who are highly intelligent but more ill-disposed toward the market are more likely to choose an academic career.

People are guided into different occupations based on their net agreeableness and disagreeableness including any personal distaste that they might have for different jobs and careers. There is growing evidence of the role of personality traits in occupational choice and career success.

The theories of occupational choice, compensating differentials and the division of labour suggest plenty of market opportunities both for caring people and for the more selfish rest of us:

Personalities with a high degree of openness are strongly over-represented in creative, theoretical fields such as writing, the arts, and pure science, and under-represented in practical, detail-oriented fields such as business, police work and manual labour.

High extraversion is over-represented in people-oriented fields like sales and business and under-represented in fields such as accounting and library work.

High agreeableness is over-represented in caring fields like teaching, nursing, religion and counselling, and under-represented in pure science, engineering and law.

Schumpeter explained in Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy that it is “the absence of direct responsibility for practical affairs” that distinguishes the academic intellectual from others “who wield the power of the spoken and the written word.”

Schumpeter and Robert Nozick argued that intellectuals were bitter that the skills so well-rewarded at school and at university with top grades were less well-rewarded in the market.

For Nozick, the intellectual wants the whole society to be a school writ large, to be like the environment where he or she did so well and was so well appreciated.

For Schumpeter, the intellectual’s main chance of asserting himself lies in his actual or potential nuisance value.

Richard Posner also had little time for academics who say they speak truth to power:

The individuals who do so do it with the quality of a risk-free lark.

A cademics, far from being marginalized outsiders, are insiders with the security of well-paid jobs from which they can be fired with difficulty.

cademics, far from being marginalized outsiders, are insiders with the security of well-paid jobs from which they can be fired with difficulty. Academics flatter themselves that they are lonely, independent seekers of truth, living at the edge.

Most academics take no risks in expressing conventional left-leaning (or politically correct) views to the public, which is part of the reason they are not regarded with much seriousness by the general public.