Thanks for writing, sounds like a great career you’ve got going, congrats! Unsurprisingly, many of your experiences track closely what I jotted down about academic economics yesterday. However, one big benefit of yours—that I didn’t think to mention, but is relevant for anyone choosing between a university and a research institute—is the like-minded coworkers.
I’d be very surprised if >2 colleagues of mine knew about EA, and even more surprised if any aside from me had thought about longtermism, etc. This definitely makes it a bit solitary. I imagine I’d be happier and more productive in an environment with even just 1-2 people excited about Global Priorities Research.
On the other hand, I think its probably useful to have GPR work being done in the wild to mainstream it some, so it’s not all negative.
That’s a great point. A related point that I hadn’t really clocked until someone pointed it out to me recently, though it’s obvious in retrospect, is that (EA aside) in an academic department it is structurally unlikely that you will have a colleague who shares your research interests to a large extent. Since it’s rare that a department is big enough to have two people doing the same thing, and departments need coverage of their whole field, for teaching and supervision.
That seems correct to me for the most part, though it might be less inevitable than you suspect, or at least this is my experience in economics. At my University they tried hiring two independent little ‘clusters’ (one being ‘macro-development’ which I was in) so I had a few people with similar enough interests to bounce ideas off of. A big caveat is that its a fragile setup: after 1 left its now just 2 of us with only loosely related interests. I have a friend in a similarly ranked department that did this for applied-environmental economics, so she has a few colleagues with similar interests. Everything said here is even truer of the top departments if you’re a strong enough candidate to land one of those.
My sense is that departments are wise enough to recognize the increasing returns to having peers with common interest at the expense of sticking faculty in teaching roles that are outside of their research areas. Though this will obviously vary job-to-job and should just be assessed when assessing whether to apply to a specific job; I just don’t think its universal enough to steer people away from academia.
Thanks for writing, sounds like a great career you’ve got going, congrats! Unsurprisingly, many of your experiences track closely what I jotted down about academic economics yesterday. However, one big benefit of yours—that I didn’t think to mention, but is relevant for anyone choosing between a university and a research institute—is the like-minded coworkers.
I’d be very surprised if >2 colleagues of mine knew about EA, and even more surprised if any aside from me had thought about longtermism, etc. This definitely makes it a bit solitary. I imagine I’d be happier and more productive in an environment with even just 1-2 people excited about Global Priorities Research.
On the other hand, I think its probably useful to have GPR work being done in the wild to mainstream it some, so it’s not all negative.
That’s a great point. A related point that I hadn’t really clocked until someone pointed it out to me recently, though it’s obvious in retrospect, is that (EA aside) in an academic department it is structurally unlikely that you will have a colleague who shares your research interests to a large extent. Since it’s rare that a department is big enough to have two people doing the same thing, and departments need coverage of their whole field, for teaching and supervision.
That seems correct to me for the most part, though it might be less inevitable than you suspect, or at least this is my experience in economics. At my University they tried hiring two independent little ‘clusters’ (one being ‘macro-development’ which I was in) so I had a few people with similar enough interests to bounce ideas off of. A big caveat is that its a fragile setup: after 1 left its now just 2 of us with only loosely related interests. I have a friend in a similarly ranked department that did this for applied-environmental economics, so she has a few colleagues with similar interests. Everything said here is even truer of the top departments if you’re a strong enough candidate to land one of those.
My sense is that departments are wise enough to recognize the increasing returns to having peers with common interest at the expense of sticking faculty in teaching roles that are outside of their research areas. Though this will obviously vary job-to-job and should just be assessed when assessing whether to apply to a specific job; I just don’t think its universal enough to steer people away from academia.