[tptacek]

Bertelsmann (the owner of Random House) is a for-profit corporation just like Palantir (a defense contractor), but the employees of Random House don’t need to be paid as much as the employees at Palantir, because Random House is perceived (by its employees) as fundamentally good

No? The employees of Random House don't need to be paid as much because the supply of qualified candidates for those roles greatly exceeds the demand. There are lots of causes of that imbalance and most of them have nothing to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. It's also hard to get a job in the abusive video game development industry!

[dxdm]

Where does the supply come from? You could still argue that people choose this as a career when they have the choice of better-paid ones, increasing the supply of people with the smarts and training needed by the publishers.

I don't know if that's what's happening, but it might work towards TFA's point.

[chromacity]

It probably has to do with the fact that we condition children and adolescents to consider white-collar jobs as more noble than blue-collar jobs, then we tell them that to get a good white-collar job, they need a degree... and then we make STEM degrees hard by subjecting students to more math than most people realistically need. So we have a lot of frontend developers who know calculus and an oversupply of people with humanities degrees.

With that degree, you're generally pushed toward jobs in journalism, publishing, graphic design, teaching, administrative functions, and so on. Most of these pay relatively little.

[com2kid]

Calculus is required for English degrees in other countries. Heck a lot of countries require some amount of calculus just to graduate high school.

Same goes for the basics of statistics. A basic understanding of statistics is a requirement for any college degree in many countries, and for good reasons. Stats comes up all the damn time. From proper A/B testing, to marketing, to understanding public health emergencies, to making informed medical decisions.

[aworks]

I understand the value of statistics. But calculus? I say this, as someone who took 6 semesters of calculus in college.

[com2kid]

6 semesters seems like... a lot? IIRC getting a math undergrad at my Uni didn't require that many classes of calc.

I think calc 1 and 2 are extremely valuable. The concept of rate of change is fundamental to so many things in life, and understanding "area under the curve" is essential to understanding how many ideas are communicated, including lots of graphs in physics, chemistry, and economics.

Beyond that I feel calculus starts getting into specific applications and is less generally applicable to the populace at large.

[aworks]

6 quarters, not 6 semesters!

Decades later, I wish I had more linear algebra.

[tptacek]

Publishing : standard English major career track :: Gaming : standard CS major career track.

It's not much more complicated than that.

[rcxdude]

I don't think it's a matter of more 'noble', simply a more comfortable option if it's available to you. It has historically paid better and taken a lower toll on your body. The former is now less true, but the latter is still a big issue.

[x3n0ph3n3]

It's a shame that calculus isn't required by every college degree. Just because I'm not integrating functions during my normal work, doesn't mean I don't benefit from understanding the fundamental principles.

[chromacity]

Yes, totally. I was about to undero surgery but found out the doctor didn't even know about Laplace transforms. He small-mindedly spent his formative years learning anatomy, never benefitting from the knowledge of frequency-domain derivatives. I dodged that bullet by storming out.

[com2kid]

You joke, but if you talked to a doctor of radiology odds are they at least took a class covering Fourier Transforms.

[robocat]

Would you say the same about learning Christianity: maybe not directly useful for your job, however it is rather foundational to much of English society.

[x3n0ph3n3]

Yeah! I've found that learning the foundations of religions is a great way to inoculate people from worst aspects of those ideas.

[bpt3]

The number of people with humanities degrees who also could successfully obtain a rigorous CS or engineering degree is not very large.

I suggest you revisit your hypothesis with a little less bias.

[eszed]

The reverse is also true.

My current hypothesis is that as AI forces software development down less and less deterministic pathways, I suspect that the value of a basic CS degree will diminish relative to humanities training. Comfort with ambiguity, an ability to construct a workable "theory of mind", and to construct unambiguous natural-language prompts will become more relevant than grokking standard algorithms.

[bpt3]

The reverse most certainly is not true, and even if it were it wouldn't matter.

Humanities advocates have been hoping for the demise of valuable STEM degrees for at least the last 30 years. It's not happening for many reasons, of them being: All the skills you listed are also taught in an engineering and rigorous CS curriculum, plus those degrees provide validation that the individual is intelligent and determined enough to complete coursework that most people cannot.

[eszed]

I dunno, man. The difficulty (and resentment of having to even take them) most STEM majors had in my college-level writing classes causes me to doubt that, as does the general reaction on this board to any kind of problem / domain with irreducible ambiguity. But look, I'm not talking about the top ~10%, or whatever: the really smart kids can adapt to whatever gets thrown at them[0]. I'm doubtful that a 50th-percentile or below CS degree / student will retain the value that they've recently had - and given what I read on here about the present job market for new grads on here, that's maybe already happening.

Anyway, I had to pick one, my money'd be on philosophy degrees rising in value: they're already sought out by financial firms. Have you seen the sort of analytical / symbolic reasoning they do?

[0] In fact, in case you didn't know, rigorous humanities programs and research involve an awful lot of statistics and coding, even though the dinosaurs that run the MLA and most English departments aren't able to handle it.

[bpt3]

Most people don't have the "choice" of being an engineer or software developer currently.

To be blunt, it's much easier for the majority of the population to get an English degree or some other generic liberal arts degree and therefore be qualified for an entry level job in the publishing industry.

I'm sure someone somewhere is giving up a highly lucrative job to roll the dice on the next great American novel, but it's not a meaningful number.

[abetusk]

The specific analogy doesn't hold but the sentiment does.

Instead of using Palantir, working at the FSF, the Linux Foundation, etc. It's not that they don't make good money, it's that it's often a fraction of what could be made at a comparable for profit company.

I think the video game industry is an apt comparison. The pay is often not very good with the motivation being, for many people, prestige based, in some form or another. I suspect there are analogies in the game industry and publishing 50-100 years ago.

[claw-el]

Wouldn’t the supply of labor for a role or company increase if what the company do, books or video games, is associated to what most people see as good, therefore, they are more willing to build their long term skill sets in?

That perceived associated goodness is what caused the increase in qualified candidates in the first place?

[Nasrudith]

Technically yes, but it isn't just goodness. There are plenty of dirty jobs that do good and thus few people want it. The logical extreme is being a martyr - no pay and death but regarded as ultimate good.

[Ekaros]

Being a farmhand is arguably one of the most goodness jobs. You are feeding everyone else with your labour... Somehow it is not very well paid or very popular job.

[jfengel]

Some of it has to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. A lot of those jobs involve holding people's hands, "emotional labor", like nursing and teaching. These jobs are seen as something people (women, mostly) should do because they like being carers, rather than for the money. These jobs end up being paid less than they are really worth, especially since they often involve many hours without compensation.

That's hardly the only factor here. In the end it's really about the fact that we appear to have an infinite appetite for blowing people up. ($1.5 trillion, next year, a full 50% increase at a time when we're supposedly needing to cut back.)

But don't discount the thumb on the scale against jobs like these. It's a persistent problem in many industries -- so pervasive that it just looks natural.

[tptacek]

Nursing and teaching are surprisingly well-compensated fields with lots of job security and relatively straightforward entrance requirements. It's also true that both fields are valorized, but plumbing isn't and has the same dynamics. These arguments are all overdetermined.

[decimalenough]

This depends wildly on the country, but in many, public school teachers are criminally underpaid.

Nursing is also a hard job where the paycheck is nowhere near what doctors can earn.

[tptacek]

Very few professions in the world earn anywhere near what doctors can earn.

[beedeebeedee]

That may be true elsewhere, but not in the US

[wisty]

Not hugely so. Teaching isn't paid megabucks but that's partly because it's a market for lemons - it's hard to tell a good one from a bad one (and people don't even agree in what it means to be educated, are facts or "critical thinking" more important, how about discipline vs temporary comfort) so there's no high paid super stars.

There is a stereotype that teachers are low paid. Somewhat .... but there's a slight premium on doing meaningful work.

The whole premise that women are paid far less is kind of wrong anyway (or at best another outdated stereotype).

Childless men and women make about the same amount.

Women with children work fewer hours and share finances with men who work more hours, and apparently this is an injustice.

[tptacek]

Outside of low-population rural school districts, the idea that teachers are poorly paid --- at least for the last 30 years or so --- comes from people not understanding the value of a defined-benefit pension plan (and, if you want to go that far, that people don't understand the interplay between an annual salary and a huge number of days off work).

[wisty]

I think the holdiays are offset by the nature of the job - even the lasiest teachers actually have to show up and work, they don't just type "camera issue" in a WFH meeting then watch Netflix (or do something just as pointless and lazy in a face to face meeting).

If you're comparing teachers to nurses, sure nurses tend to have more pay but more hours and harder work. But most jobs that you can do with a BA in English (or any other degree that isn't either extremely competitive like medicine, or in a really high demand field right now), teachers get (at least) similar pay, for a similar amount of work (albeit compressed into the school calender). Especially if you consider benefits, as you point out.

[tptacek]

Could you be more specific? I don't know what you're referring to.

[mold_aid]

Almost certain OP is referring to the fact that nurses and teachers are not well-paid or respected in the US, which I'd like to note as well. Despite this, Public Health as a pseudo-STEM major nearly ranks with STEM fields in general for majors seen as "workplace-ready."

Maybe there are too many English majors (I honestly think the supply of careers is too low). But I think the "supply is greater than the demand" is possibly now more an explanatory argument for unemployment rates for Engineering and PT and other such quiescent majors. Certainly there are plenty of Ed majors for a field whose workers fled at pace earlier this decade.

Let's assume I'm teaching 25 or so Engl majors right now in a class with publishing as its central focus (hypothetically) at a state school. The students would neither be able to define "small press" nor name the big 5 - even the ones who just came back from AWP. The linked piece, I think, correctly names the romanticized vision of publishing that is divorced from understandings of the cost of living in NYC. I don't also think that college majors are actually all that itchy to get into editorial, whether or not they're all and every single one applying for the same pool of jobs.

[tptacek]

If the claim is "nurses and teachers are poorly paid in the US", that claim is broadly false. K-12 teachers in major metro areas in the US have surprisingly generous comp packages: well above area median take-home salary with predictable ladders, very good benefits, and defined-benefit pension plans.

There are school districts where teachers are poorly compensated, but they aren't the norm over the population as a whole. Teachers are generally well-compensated.

Nursing, I don't know where to start.