Tag Archives: social norm

Of airline food and a day of service

The purpose of airline food is not to feed people but to show that the airline cares. The small plastic boxes with different food in each are a pretense of a multi-course meal. Multi-course meals are considered fancy. If the goal was to feed people, then a large sandwich or a bowl of pasta would be logistically simpler to provide and eat, cheaper and more filling.
Similarly a day of service (of volunteering) of some organization is not designed to help others but to show that the organization cares. The organization wants to be seen to be helping. If educated employees go and clean the park or work at a soup kitchen, it is a waste of their talents. It would be more productive to do their regular work and donate their salary to hire cheaper labour for the simple volunteering jobs. More volunteering output (cleaner park, food for the homeless) would be produced. Division of labour increases overall productivity, as Adam Smith pointed out.
Volunteering by highly qualified people may make sense if it is a vacation for them – their enjoyment outweighs the productivity loss relative to the efficient arrangement where everyone does their specialized job. A different type of work is a break from routine, which may be restful.
Once I participated in the Yale Day of Service. It was supposed to last from 9:00 to 14:00, so more like a half-day of service. Many people were late, so we started going towards the worksite at about 9:30 and reached it in ten or fifteen minutes. We were supposed to clear the underbrush among some park trees. The tools were dull gardening shears. The work ended at about 12:30. One person with a motorized trimmer could have done in ten minutes what twenty people with shears did in two hours. Clearly the goal was not to clear the park of bushes and weeds, but either a social event or a show of caring. Namewise, Yale Two Hours of Service sounds less nice than a Day.

Wasteful academic travel

Academics fly around the world to meet coauthors, go to conferences or present seminars. These things could easily be done by videoconferencing, saving money, travel time, environment and productivity lost to jetlag. An objection I have heard is that video calls are not the same thing. What other senses besides sight and hearing do people use to communicate with their colleagues? A handshake maybe. Then build a robotic arm that gives haptic feedback to imitate any person’s hand and that can be used to shake hands at a distance.
If a wall-sized screen disguised at the edges is put in a seminar room and the audience walks in together, it would be a challenge to distinguish a real speaker at the front of the room from a speaker shown on the big screen. Eye tracking software can adjust the screen image as the viewer changes position to give the impression of 3D. Or the audience can wear virtual reality glasses like Oculus Rift.
Other than habit, commitment may be a reason for physical travel. If a person has travelled to give a seminar, the audience would feel embarrassed for not attending. This would be felt less if the presentation is via video and could be recorded. Then the option to watch it later would give people the excuse to constantly postpone watching. If an academic travels to a conference, there are fewer distractions than at home or at work, so a greater chance of actually going to the presentations.
The proliferation of laptops, smartphones and tablets is undermining this commitment – one can attend a talk and not pay attention, checking email or surfing the web instead. Google Glasses would have an even stronger effect: the eyes can be pointed towards the speaker while actually watching and listening something else.

Eliminating for-profit academic publishing

Much has been written about the high profits academic publishers get from the volunteer labour of their referees and editors, and how high subscription costs reduce funds available for actual research. The opinion pieces and blog posts I have seen do not suggest a concrete way to change the system. They only express hope that with more researchers putting their work on the web, the for-profit publishing industry will eventually disappear. I think this disappearance can and should be hastened. The obvious way is to boycott for-profit journals as an author, referee, editor and librarian.
The obvious objection is that one’s career depends on publishing in certain journals that often happen to be for-profit, and that “service to the profession” (refereeing and editing) is one’s duty and also helps the career a bit. A moral counterargument is that while boycotting may impose some personal costs, it benefits other researchers and the increase in research benefits everyone, so as a favour to the rest of humanity, boycott is the right thing. After all, why do people become academic researchers when the private sector pays more?
Game theoretically, the academic system (including publishing) is a coordination game, like many social norms. As long as everyone else conforms to the system, it is costly to depart from it. Thus self-interested people choose to conform to the system. This keeps the system stable. Individual deviations are costly, but a collective (coalitional) deviation may be costless or at least cheaper. An example is the whole editorial board of a for-profit journal deciding to resign and start a nonprofit copy of this journal. They announce publicly that all articles that researchers were planning to submit to the for-profit journal should now be submitted to the nonprofit copy. The refereeing and editing process goes on as before, only the library subscriptions to the new journal are cheaper. There should be no loss of prestige for the editors or loss of publishing opportunity for the authors.
A journal is not complicated – it only requires an online system to let authors upload relatively small text files, let the editors forward these files (with author identity removed) to referees, referees to upload their text files and the editors to forward these (deidentified) files to authors. Such programs surely exist, free and open-source as well.
Perhaps a proofreader could be hired for the journal and paid out of subscription fees. But the total cost of running a journal (with volunteer labour like now) is very low.