Dave Hoffman

Many of us are trying to figure out where the AI labor market transition may be going. But that's fundamentally unknowable. So instead of trying to predict the future we can instead look back to try to figure out what may be coming...by reading 19th c english literature 1/

I'm not the only one to notice this, but incredible growth of BigLaw rents (in absolute terms and compared to ibanks) is wild when counterpoised w/ predictions of near-term knowledge economy disruption/doom.

@PrawfBainbridge Conditional on entering law school I don't think that selection operates particularly strongly.

@HoffProf So why do so many left-wing young people opt “to make less money and have more free time”? Are they lazy? Or incapable of holding down a BigLaw job?

I half-agree with some of this, but the "supply-follows-demand" idea is (imho) mostly misleading. Academic hiring is a very distinctive employment market. It's time lagged and age-constrained.

@daskeel @OrinKerr @derektmuller draculaw.com

@HoffProf @OrinKerr @derektmuller Good point, though I was thinking more than no one's asking Leonardo DiCaprio to portray a nefarious lawyer.

Question for @HoffProf or @OrinKerr or @derektmuller : what ever happened to lawyer jokes? They used to be ubiquitous, but now I never hear them. Have we been overtaken by Wall Street finance types?

@Sherman1890 I was going to illustrate the point with observations about outliers on our own faculty but I thought better of it :)

@HoffProf I've noticed that.

@Sherman1890 It's a big country and there are always outliers!

@HoffProf Probably. It doesnt account for the rise of the Chicago School, a libertarian revolution that dominated there through the 1970s; or the aggressively laissez faire positions of the political economy movement centered at Harvard, Brown, and some other elites in the 19th century.

@Sherman1890 It's hard to compare as universities were so different on a million dimensions in 1950 than they are now (75 years later). I would say that left dominance is the persistent state of the modern university, just as conservative dominance is the persistent state of other sectors.

@HoffProf I believe leftish dominance in universities is largely a 1960s+ phenomenon. It has not always been the case, certainly not to the current extent.

Use chatbots to front-run prediction markets: everyone's a winner.

The essay has a different theory of change, which I think will be self-defeating. But I agree it's a problem that's important to solve.

And--obviously--so would encouraging right-leaning politicians and commentators to stop bashing higher ed.

@Sherman1890 Universities are institutions embedded in society and will respond to political and cultural pressures (as they should!). My point is that as a hiring market, it's not a thing where you can immediately increase the sales of widgets by decreasing their price.

@HoffProf maybe, but what if the demand is coming from the Administration rather than any constituency, including students, who are actually inside the University?

@mjbommar In other words, who needs the annoyances of the job when you can have it all! (Plus, you can do some really good gardening.)

@HoffProf speaking personally, i think it's an even harder problem. you can both "leave" academia for greener economic pastures AND continue to research and teach as a hobby.

@Sherman1890 The essay suggests that the root of the problem is demand. I'm pushing back.

@HoffProf you don't believe that affirmative action for conservatives would bring more of them into academia?