Meager Means and Noble Ends

impOn Monday we marked the hundredth birthday of the Nobel laureate and all-around intellectual curmudgeon George Stigler. I promised more Stigler quotes by the end of the week. Here, then, is Stigler on the consequences of competition in the market for higher education; the passage is from one of the two-dozen lively and provocative essays collected here. If he’d been born just a bit later, Stigler could have been a champion blogger.

For clarity: When Stigler refers to an academic “field”, he is referring to a sub-discipline. Economics is a discipline; industrial organization and public finance are fields. Physics is a discipline; particle physics and solid state physics are fields.

We cannot build universities that are uniformly excellent … I shall seek to establish this conclusion directly on the basis of two empirical propositions.

The first proposition is that there are at most fourteen really first-class men in any field, and more commonly there are about six. Where, you ask, did I get these numbers? I consider your question irrelevant, but I shall pause to notice the related question: Is the proposition true? And here I ask you to do your homework: gather with your colleagues and make up a numbered list of the twenty-five best men in one of your fields — and remember that these fields are specialized. Would your department be first-class if it began its staffing in each field with the twenty-fifth, or even the fifteenth, name? You have in fact done this work on appointment committees. I remember no cases of an embarrassment of riches, and I remember many where finding five names involved a shift to “promising young men”, not all of whom keep their promises. I leave it to the professors of moral philosophy and genetics to tell us whether the paucity of first-class men is a sort of scientific myopia, a love of invidious ranking, or a harsh outcome of imprudent marriages. But the proposition is true.

My second proposition is that no one school has much in the way of financial resources … No school, not even the richest, has a wages-fund sufficient to hire one of the six best men in each field within the traditional arts and sciences. Fifty or a hundred institutions seriously seek such men, and even the fiftieth in wealth — which is about one-fourth as rich as the first in wealth — can bid enough for one or two such leaders to make them prohibitively expensive to others. The richest museums cannot acquire all the Rembrandts, and the richest school cannot hire all the leaders.

Universities will make their peace with the forces of specialization by making a choice that falls somewhere between two poles: a universal mediocrity, at one end; a select and none too lengthy list of truly distinguished departments, at the other. I diffidently interpret the tradition of Chicago to be that which I, too, desire: the preservation of pre-eminence in a dozen of the most durable and basic disciplines, with at least respectable competence in the remainder of the basic disciplines — and nothing more.

But the goal of selective eminence cannot be pursued effectively if one ignores its selectivity. The goal cannot be achieved if we fail to be ruthless with proposals to increase our comprehensiveness: it is a fact of life that a vote for a school of journalism or an institute of automation is a vote to get rid of one or two first-class men in physics or anthropology or law. The goal cannot be achieved if we insist that every department be almost pre-eminent: a vote to hire two expensive number-twenty men is a vote to be rid of a number-one man. These are different ways of saying that we must steer the difficult course between easy achievement and romantic impossibility. Some women are not fastidious, and others insist upon marrying only perfect men. I know Chicago will not become a harlot; I do not want it to become a spinster.

I would add a word concerning a very troublesome lot who insist upon intruding into the discussions of their betters — I refer to the students. The student cannot achieve the best possible instruction in every specialized field at any one institution; this I shall now treat as a corollary. Though a student does not study every specialized field even within one department, he would often profit by dividing his time between institutions whose strengths complement one another. There would be much merit in the development, at the graduate level, of spending a half year or a year at a second institution. This practice, you will recall, was prevalent during the fourteenth century; and, on balance, transportation has improved since then (aside from parking). The student would also gain perspective by living in a different intellectual atmosphere, and the professors — for whom things must be good if they are to be good for the country — would also gain by the diversity of students.

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8 Responses to “Meager Means and Noble Ends”


  1. 1 1 Mike

    I laughed out loud when he shot down his straw man question as “irrelevant” even though he was the one that posed it and it was perfectly logical to inquire about. Almost as good as ‘“promising young men”, not all of whom keep their promises.’

  2. 2 2 Ron

    Stigler bases his argument on “no one school has much in the way of
    financial resources … No school, not even the richest, has a
    wages-fund sufficient to hire one of the six best men in each field
    within the traditional arts and sciences.”

    He explicitly ignores non-financial incentives. One such is the
    synergy of having a lot of top people together. A critical mass of
    top people has the potential to attract other top people.

    I’ll Salsman in an excerpt from “Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!”:

             ============================

    But one day, when I hadn’t been at Caltech very long, we had a bad
    attack of smog. It was worse then than it is now-at least your eyes
    smarted much more. I was standing on a corner, and my eyes were
    watering, and I thought to myself, “This is crazy! This is
    absolutely INSANE! It was all right back at Cornell. I’m getting
    out of here.”

    So I called up Cornell, and asked them if they thought it was
    possible for me to come back. They said, “Sure! We’ll set it up
    and call you back tomorrow.”

    The next day, I had the greatest luck in making a decision. God
    must have set it up to help me decide. I was walking to my office,
    and a guy came running up to me and said, “Hey, Feynman! Did you
    hear what happened? Baade found that there are two different
    populations of stars! All the measurements we had been making of
    the distances to the galaxies had been based on Cephid variables of
    one type, but there’s another type, so the universe is twice, or
    three, or even four times as old as we thought!”

    I knew the problem. In those days, the earth appeared to be older
    than the universe. The earth was four and a half billion, and the
    universe was only a couple, or three billion years old. It was a
    great puzzle. And this discovery resolved all that: The universe
    was now demonstrably older than was previously thought. And I got
    this information right away-the guy came running up to me to tell me
    all this.

    I didn’t even make it across the campus to get to my office, when
    another guy came up-Matt Meselson, a biologist who had minored in
    physics. (I had been on his committee for his Ph.D.) He had built
    the first of what they call a density gradient centrifuge-it could
    measure the density of molecules. He said, “Look at the results of
    the experiment I’ve been doing!”

    He had proved that when a bacterium makes a new one, there’s a whole
    molecule, intact, which is passed from one bacterium to another-a
    molecule we now know as DNA. You see, we always think of everything
    dividing, dividing. So we think everything in the bacterium divides
    and gives half of it to the new bacterium. But that’s impossible:
    Somewhere, the smallest molecule that contains genetic information
    can’t divide in half; it has to make a copy of itself, and send one
    copy to the new bacterium, and keep one copy for the old one. And
    he had proved it in this way: He first grew the bacteria in heavy
    nitrogen, and later grew them all in ordinary nitrogen. As he went
    along, he weighed the molecules in his density gradient centrifuge.

    The first generation of new bacteria had all of their chromosome
    molecules at a weight exactly in between the weight of molecules
    made with heavy, and molecules made with ordinary, nitrogen-a result
    that could occur if everything divided, including the chromosome
    molecules.

    But in succeeding generations, when one might expect that the weight
    of the chromosome molecules would be one-fourth, one-eighth, and
    one-sixteenth of the difference between the heavy and ordinary
    molecules, the weights of the molecules fell into only two groups.
    One group was the same weight as the first new generation (halfway
    between the heavier and the lighter molecules), and the other group
    was lighter-the weight of molecules made in ordinary nitrogen. The
    percentage of heavier molecules was cut in half in each succeeding
    generation, but not their weights. That was tremendously exciting,
    and very important- it was a fundamental discovery. And I realized,
    as I finally got to my office, that this is where I’ve got to be.
    Where people from all different fields of science would tell me
    stuff, and it was all exciting. It was exactly what I wanted,
    really.

    So when Cornell called a little later, and said they were setting
    everything up, and it was nearly ready, I said, “I’m sorry, I’ve
    changed my mind again.”

  3. 3 3 Ken

    Ron,

    “He explicitly ignores non-financial incentives. One such is the
    synergy of having a lot of top people together. A critical mass of
    top people has the potential to attract other top people.”

    Your example is perfect at illustrating Stigler’s point: is Caltech known for it’s law school? How about English department? How about it’s business school?

    Let’s narrow it down to a single department, math. Please show me the school that, just in the math department, has the number one guy (or one that could even POSSIBLY hire the number one guy) in ALL of the following, non-exhaustive list of mathematical fields:

    Representation Theory
    Automorphic Forms
    Arithmetic Algebraic Geometry
    Locally symmetric spaces
    Algebraic Geometry
    Motives
    K-Theory
    Cohomology of Groups
    Arakelov Theory
    Algebraic Number Theory
    Arithmetic Algebraic Geometry
    Wavelet Theory
    Signal Processing
    Pseudodifferential Operators
    Analysis on Fractals
    C*-Algebras
    Noncommutative Analysis
    Kähler Manifolds
    Quasiconformal Geometry
    Complex Dynamics
    Riemann Surfaces
    Model Theory
    Set Theory
    Proof Theory
    Moduli Spaces
    Index Theory
    Algebraic Topology
    Differential Topology
    Bifurcation Theory
    Sobelev Spaces
    Symbolic Dynamics
    Ergodic theory
    Chaotic Dynamics
    Low-Dimensional Topology
    Numerical Methods
    Nonlinear Analysis
    Topological Methods in Nonlinear Partial Differential Equations
    Hyperbolic Partial Differential Equations
    Numerical Analysis
    Stochastic Partial Differential Equations
    Estimation Theory
    Random Perturbations of Dynamical Systems
    Statistical Inference for Stochastic Processes
    Survival Analysis
    Nonparametric Statistics
    Categorical Data

    I understand that it would be nice to get some collaboration or synergy between groups and estimation theory, but the reality is not so much. The best group theorists will go where the best group theorists are, not necessarily where the best number theorists are, even though there is significant overlap between the two.

    Economics is the study of ALL scarce resources, not just financial ones. Synergy is a finite resource: not much synergy, if any, happening between a group theorist and an estimation theorist, much less a group theorist and a constitutional law theorist.

    Regards,
    Ken

  4. 4 4 Doctor Memory

    No school, not even the richest, has a wages-fund sufficient to hire one of the six best men in each field within the traditional arts and sciences.

    I’m not sure that the administrators of Harvard’s endowment ($25 billion, and nearly 50% larger than the next-largest, being Yale) would agree.

  5. 5 5 Robert S. Porter

    I’m not sure that the administrators of Harvard’s endowment ($25 billion, and nearly 50% larger than the next-largest, being Yale) would agree.

    And yet they don’t.

  6. 6 6 Steve Landsburg

    Ron:

    He explicitly ignores non-financial incentives. One such is the
    synergy of having a lot of top people together. A critical mass of
    top people has the potential to attract other top people.

    In fact, in the part of the essay I didn’t quote, Stigler explicitly considers and rejects this argument. I strongly encourage spending $11.95 for the book so you can read the whole essay (and the others of course).

  7. 7 7 awp

    “The first proposition is that there are at most fourteen really first-class men in any field, and more commonly there are about six.”

    This reminds me of a joke between me and my fellow grad student.

    “I am not sure how good my job market paper is.”
    “It’s okay, Adam.”
    “Why is that?”
    “Well I can assure you that you are among the hundred best Urban economists in the country.”
    “Really? How could you say that?”
    “Well there are only about fifty of you.”

  8. 8 8 dave

    g1, awp. that reminds me of a joke..
    very often, carpenters with a few years experience will put ‘finish carpenter’ on their resume when trying to get a new position.
    i was the lead carpenter for a contractor when our new hire arrived one day..
    ‘are you the finish carpenter?’ i asked.
    ‘yeah!’ he replied.
    ‘then jump on in here and help me finish this ditch.’

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