This is a really mature introspective thought to articulate...
> Academics have uniformly rather low salaries, increasing our tendency to focus on social status as a measure of success. Salary gradations are useful for disrupting mimetic effects because they tie effort expended directly to units of universal economic value — convertible to kilos of rice, oil, and stuff in the physical world. A price is a lifeline to reality: all else being equal, the job with the lower wage is probably less valuable. Without this signal, the goals of a peer group are easily decoupled from the outside world, making it easy to drift into time-wasting pursuits.
What a concept, endeavors detached from price signals and the specific distortions he faced in his academic “market” if you will.
Sure, but how many jobs have you had where everyone needed to make quarterly numbers, to the detriment of building something for something for future generations? Money shouldn't be the sole signal of success in society. We have enough (too much of) that already.
I think there's a larger issue of flawed heuristics for progress. The kind of memetics this article is talking about is one such heuristic. Going for the money is another.
They are both potentially flawed in their core if the expectation is that they will solve our societal issues. They are both memes in that they are evolved to propagate themselves. And that's what they do best.
It's probably not an accident that vigorous contempt for everything relating to markets and price signals runs high in academia, where differences in pay across occupations are considered a form of structural oppression.
> Academics have uniformly rather low salaries, increasing our tendency to focus on social status as a measure of success. Salary gradations are useful for disrupting mimetic effects because they tie effort expended directly to units of universal economic value — convertible to kilos of rice, oil, and stuff in the physical world. A price is a lifeline to reality: all else being equal, the job with the lower wage is probably less valuable. Without this signal, the goals of a peer group are easily decoupled from the outside world, making it easy to drift into time-wasting pursuits.
What a concept, endeavors detached from price signals and the specific distortions he faced in his academic “market” if you will.