I think the sunk cost fallacy can be pretty powerful when it comes to people’s careers. After spending so much time and effort on a phd I can see it being hard for people to give that up and go into a private sector job that didn’t necessarily need that degree.
there is that but feel it's quite a bit deeper than that.
think beliefs/status/identity play a bigger role, more of a constraint, more inflexible and harder to move past.
you can say it's a mechanism via which the sunk cost fallacy operates, and guess it's often true.
but guess having talked to a bunch of those folks, feel one needs to dig into the mechanism to have an impact, and simply pointing out to sk-fallacy is insufficient
In the old nobility, "going into trade" was not to be thought of, and going into the army or navy was a poor second choice to "being on the Land" (yes, they capitalized it).
Money was the means by which you could be on the Land, not the what the Land got you. You ended up spending money on the Land in many cases, which you got from elsewhere. If you got lots more money, you bought more Land. You never sold any Land, unless you had to. If you had spare money, you spent it on hobbies (such as raising horses for hunting) which usually lost money, but required lots of Land.
There were only certain acceptable means of getting the money - inheriting it being the favorite and marrying it being a close second.
Does this sound familiar? Being on the path to a tenure-track research position at a top university is the only acceptable life, and if you get off that track, you tried to stay as close as possible to it.
feel related the vague idea I've been forming along the lines of "most careers are mostly about status".
like, obviously academia talent practices are suboptimal, all the artificial "no breaks else you're out" and "not hiring senior outsiders" don't make much sense in light of what other orgs are doing: Anthropic is happy to hire a bunch of Jane Street people into research as simply that's how you get top smart ppl (or Valley researchy startups welcoming "genius in his garage" types).
and, more generally, if your model of reality is "talent is (mostly) what matters" then all those extremely narrow exclusionary entry pathways in many disciplines (academia, medicine, others) just don't make much sense.
except ofc they do, as those fields are not particularly talent-constrained, but can maintain high-status by being exclusive and having those narrow entry pathways.
hence, "most careers are mostly about status", and status is what people really deeply want and crave. through this lens adjunct behavior is extremely rational as status is the only salient variable and sticking around presents a small but real "chance of redemption" and "it all making sense in the end": hmm guess part of this is striving for status and another (related?) part is about one's identity and self coherence. given those are the important things, and exiting the adjunct market implies broken identity but also maybe permanently low status (as high status careers feature those narrow entry pathways often taking a decade which might either be inaccessible or impractical at that point), ofc one stays.
I think the sunk cost fallacy can be pretty powerful when it comes to people’s careers. After spending so much time and effort on a phd I can see it being hard for people to give that up and go into a private sector job that didn’t necessarily need that degree.
there is that but feel it's quite a bit deeper than that.
think beliefs/status/identity play a bigger role, more of a constraint, more inflexible and harder to move past.
you can say it's a mechanism via which the sunk cost fallacy operates, and guess it's often true.
but guess having talked to a bunch of those folks, feel one needs to dig into the mechanism to have an impact, and simply pointing out to sk-fallacy is insufficient
In the old nobility, "going into trade" was not to be thought of, and going into the army or navy was a poor second choice to "being on the Land" (yes, they capitalized it).
Money was the means by which you could be on the Land, not the what the Land got you. You ended up spending money on the Land in many cases, which you got from elsewhere. If you got lots more money, you bought more Land. You never sold any Land, unless you had to. If you had spare money, you spent it on hobbies (such as raising horses for hunting) which usually lost money, but required lots of Land.
There were only certain acceptable means of getting the money - inheriting it being the favorite and marrying it being a close second.
Does this sound familiar? Being on the path to a tenure-track research position at a top university is the only acceptable life, and if you get off that track, you tried to stay as close as possible to it.
this is good.
feel related the vague idea I've been forming along the lines of "most careers are mostly about status".
like, obviously academia talent practices are suboptimal, all the artificial "no breaks else you're out" and "not hiring senior outsiders" don't make much sense in light of what other orgs are doing: Anthropic is happy to hire a bunch of Jane Street people into research as simply that's how you get top smart ppl (or Valley researchy startups welcoming "genius in his garage" types).
and, more generally, if your model of reality is "talent is (mostly) what matters" then all those extremely narrow exclusionary entry pathways in many disciplines (academia, medicine, others) just don't make much sense.
except ofc they do, as those fields are not particularly talent-constrained, but can maintain high-status by being exclusive and having those narrow entry pathways.
hence, "most careers are mostly about status", and status is what people really deeply want and crave. through this lens adjunct behavior is extremely rational as status is the only salient variable and sticking around presents a small but real "chance of redemption" and "it all making sense in the end": hmm guess part of this is striving for status and another (related?) part is about one's identity and self coherence. given those are the important things, and exiting the adjunct market implies broken identity but also maybe permanently low status (as high status careers feature those narrow entry pathways often taking a decade which might either be inaccessible or impractical at that point), ofc one stays.