[extropy-chat] Adjunct Faculty: Serfs on the Knowledge Plantation

[Robin Hanson]

At 11:04 AM 1/19/2005, Terry W. Colvin wrote:
>< http://www.fiu.edu/~mizrachs/knowledge-serfs.html >
>[The Dark Side of Adjunctia]
>"Adjunct Faculty: Serfs on the Knowledge Plantation

This seems to me to dismiss the supply and demand story too quickly.  Yes, 
if schools made classes smaller they would hire more teachers.  But maybe 
students prefer the current package.  There are thousands of universities, 
any of which could profit by switching to smaller classes, if in fact the 
additional value students placed on them was below their additional cost.

Consider the analogy with movies.  There are lots of actors making very 
little money because they hope someday to be a movie star.  We could blame 
the studios for not making movies that use more actors.  But the fact that 
studios consider this option and reject it suggests that they don't expect 
movie viewers to place a large enough additional value on such movies to 
pay for the additional cost.



Robin Hanson  rhanson at gmu.edu  http://hanson.gmu.edu
Assistant Professor of Economics, George Mason University
MSN 1D3, Carow Hall, Fairfax VA 22030-4444
703-993-2326  FAX: 703-993-2323