A few weeks back Ilya, Megan McArdle, and Arnold Kling had a go-around with the question of why academics are less happy in their jobs than other people. Assume for the sake of argument that is true, and I think there is some truth to it. I think I'm thinking along the same lines as Ilya, Megan, and Arnold, but here's how I think of it. This is all overgeneralized, but I think captures the essential dynamic.

Most Americans work in a money economy. The good thing about a money-based economy is that wealth is inherently a positive-sum game. Sure, there are some zero-sum aspects to it, but more money for by neighbor doesn't mean less for me. Thus, it is possible for all of us to get richer without any inherent zero-sum rivalry.

Academia, by contrast, is a status-based economy rather than a money-based economy. Status, unlike income, is an inherently zero-sum game. I can only have more status if you have less--status is all relative and positional. This means that at any given time those with less status are trying to gain more status. And those with high status are tenuously trying to hold on to their high status--with the threats coming from those with lower status trying to knock them off.

Now here's where it gets kind of twisted--given that the money-based economy is the default rule in America, who is it that are most likely to self-select into a status-based economy? You got it--those are are most motivated by status. So those who will self-select into the status-based economy are those who have a different tradeoff between status and income than the typical person. Indeed, the salary scale in academia is very flat when compared to that in other occupations, especially those comparable for academics such as law and business.

What this means is that we get those who are most obsessed and insecure about status entering into the status-based economy.

So I think this might explain some of the peculiarites of the sociology of our profession to outsiders. Outsiders often are baffled by the sorts of battles that consume academics and our obsession about things like whether our work is cited. "Who cares?" whether your article was cited asks my wife (well, she doesn't actually say it but you can tell she's thinking it). But that's the point--citations are not merely a means to higher income (as they would be in the standard economy) but in many ways they are the primary reward or income itself.

There is the old saying that "academic battles are so vicious because the stakes are so small." That's nonsense. There are middle managers all over America right this moment backstabbing each other for a nicer office or better parking space. What makes academic battles so vicious, I think, is that there is the status battle tied up in them.

Moreover, an academic's work is personal in a sense that most people's work is not. Your identity is tied to your work in a very different way from say, an electrician or a car manufacturer. It is an extension of your identity. So when your work is ignored or criticized, it is very difficult not to take it personally. Again, this reinforces the nefarious status dynamic.

So that's my view as to why academics are so weird. And why they often seem unhappy as well--it is difficult to be truly comfortable in your particular status ranking because there is always relative positioning going on. As Arnold Kling stresses, this suggests that the only way to be truly happy as an academic is to try to opt-out of the status arms-race: "Once you get on the ego treadmill, not only do you become bitter, but you have to start viewing others not for their intrinsic qualities but for their usefulness as stepping stones. If you can stay off of the ego treadmill, then success becomes more a matter of being near friends and living in an area with the type of amenities you prefer."

That's the main thing, I think. In talking about academics and happiness, however, as a purely empirical matter there is one possible other factor that might be relevant. And let me stress that this is being presented as purely correlation and not causation, positive not normative. Research indicates that those who are conservative and religious tend, on average, to be more likely to be happy than those who are not. To the extent that academics are disproportionately non-conservative and non-religious--which is plainly the case--as a purely statistical matter one would predict that academics would be less likely to be happy than the general population.

I was recently reading William F. Buckley's book Nearer, My God. He did make one interesting point in passing, which is something along the lines that he had known some people during his life who would have been happier had they known that a divine force was looking out for them. (I can't recall the exact quote as I thought the book itself pretty mediocre and got rid of it as soon as I finished reading it, so I don't have it here to reference the exact quote). But there is an interesting point here, which is that it seems that those of religious conviction are often happier and more contented with their life than others.

Critics might respond that perhaps they should be unhappier and that religion is just a delusion to keep them from confronting how terrible their plight in life is. But that's not the point--the point is that whether they should be unhappy or not, reserach indicates those who are religious in fact are happier than others and my casual observation of people suggests that conclusion seems plausible to me. I'll save my speculations on why that might be for another day (I think the argument looks something like this), and simply note here the empirical point and the plausibility to me of those empirical results.

Again, on this second point, the observation is purely an empirical conclusion, not a normative one, and would be a theory grounded in the type of people who are represented in academia rather than anything inherent in academia itself.

Update:

I should emphasize that I myself am not unhappy to be a law professor. In fact, I love it. And I've also worked in private practice and in the government. So this post is based on generalizations of those experiences.