Inquisitive Bird on poverty and crime; Noah Smith on the corruption of science; Erik Hoel on a book-writer's odds; and Noah Smith on a history Ph.D's odds
Noah Smith does not mention the transformation of so many humanities departments into race and gender obsessed ideological bastions. This helps explain both why they get fewer students and why white males don't get hired. There is still pressure on other non-humanities departments to go that route, at least in prestigious private universities and public universities in progressive states. Form a concentration of "diversity science" in your social science department, and all work will be DEI-friendly, not interesting, and not good.
"Many corkball players end up being absorbed as administrators in universities or nonprofit foundations." Add the plethora of bureaucracies. In other words, your dad was essentially correct... still milking the taxpayer -- indirectly.
Given the way higher education funding is structured, they're still getting paid by the government. It's just laundered through the "higher ed" system, among other ways.
Peer-review only really works when the result being published are from experiments that the reviewer and readers themselves can easily try to replicate. My field was organic/organo-metallic chemistry and biochemistry/medicinal chemistry. I reviewed a fair number of papers over the years, and in only a handful of them, all on organic/organometallic side (maybe 10 out of 100 or so papers reviewed) was it possible for me to attempt to replicate the experiment in the laboratory, and I did so in those cases, and all of those were legitimate results- the other 90 or so papers were biochemical/medicinal chemistry papers that weren't possible for me to attempt to replicate because to do so would cost thousands or more dollars and would involve the participation of more than just myself. In those papers I would just study them to make sure there were no obvious errors or fabrications, but the truth is you never really know whether or not you are reading a fraud.
In short, you are likely to find more fraud the more difficult it is to try to replicate the experiment. A paper that claims a particular chemical transformation is usually easy to replicate for any chemist with lab, and my experience is that there are very few such fraudulent/mistaken papers in peer-reviewed journals. I can't imagine what it is like in fields like sociology and economics.
Ever since the Pell Grant program, aren't all accredited colleges that take federal student loans the beneficiary of massive subsidies? I think they are playing corkball with taxpayer money.
Like, if the government got in the business of auto loans so that everyone who wants to drive a car could afford one, car dealerships would see a massive increase in demand for their inventory and would be able to start ratcheting up prices and enjoying the benefits of that subsidy.
"Corkball" made me think of our former governor, Michael Dukakis. He ran for president in 1988 with a slogan of "good jobs for good wages". Being a liberal Democrat that basically meant going to college. But that prescription runs up against the fact that, at least in 1988, there just weren't enough well-paying "indoor work, no heavy lifting" jobs that required a college degree. So what could bring job supply up to demand?
A lot of things. None of them with a stated purpose to provide those jobs--but they gave lots of people a good feeling because they sensed they had that effect. And so there was damn little pushback. Add lots of administrators to higher ed. Encourage foundations and other non-profits. Add regulation after regulation, so there is a big market for "compliance officers" and related people. Voila. Demand meets supply. To quote Arnold, a self-licking ice cream cone.
It was bipartisan in my view. Republicans were just as culpable in encouraging vast numbers of largely unqualified people to load themselves up with debt to obtain a degree that was either useless or underutilized. The GOPe is still fighting tooth and nail to keep the party from actually shifting to promotion of skills-based training and workers (what some people like to denigrate as 'populism')
When I'm feeling charitable, I think Republicans actually believed the bullsh*t: a college degree makes you successful, and anyone can get a college degree if they can afford it, so the government should help people afford it.
When I'm feeling less charitable, I think they just went along because they knew opposition was a vote loser. And there was no creativity, no attempt to break the cycle of "federal aid goes up, tuition and fees go up a similar amount, so people still have trouble affording it." Also, no attempt to get the money-receiving institutions to channel students into programs which would be remunerative after they graduate--or to develop such programs in the first place. (I suppose the cynic would say that for the lower half of the bell curve, there can be no such college program.)
Re: "the whole system of incentives in academia ought to be redesigned."
Was the system of incentives in academia ever "designed"?
Who would redesign the system? A State legislature or governor for a State public university system? A prestigious group of private universities (say, the Ivies)? A visionary group of private colleges who lack prestige but who champion "value added"? Others?
It's hard to discern an archimedean point with sufficient incentive to change the system of incentives.
Alternatives might be:
(a) Disruption, either by new colleges or by entrepreneurial creation of new "signaling" mechanisms for employment.
(b) Some sort of market drift or organizational evolution as consumers exit.
My thought on that was that so long as there is a pile of government funding going to academia there can't be a realignment of incentives towards better science. Normally, I would expect that end users of the research would start changing incentives, or changing research providers, but I think at root the vast majority of academic research doesn't have end users outside of government grants and political requests. Even things like medical research isn't so much used by companies to improve health as much as market things they have researched in house, and those few that do get worked on in academia are a tiny sliver of what gets time and money spent on it.
So I think so long as we consider "basic research" to be a public good the government needs to throw money at we are going to get a lot of research that is bad.
"My thought on that was that so long as there is a pile of government funding going to academia there can't be a realignment of incentives towards better science.”
This. Free money corrupts everything it touches. I’ll say it once again: Follow the money!
I worked in the professional theater for a bit right out of college. But it didn’t take me long to figure out a couple of things:
1) success was only very loosely correlated to talent and hard work. One of the best actors I worked with struggled to find success; one of the more-successful wasn’t exceptionally talented but fit an archetype that gave him some level of success.
2) there’s a high degree of variability. The *best* actor I worked with is now more-or-less a household name. But he was in his, I think, late 30s before he began to find that success, otherwise working in relative obscurity for, what?, 20 years?
Put both of these things together and there just isn’t a reliable enough path to success in the arts for anyone who has ability in more conventional areas to pick it as a career. But…
3) the one thing I could have done is become a college professor. I applied and got into a few good grad schools. But what was the future there? Getting paid to produce nothing particularly of value, i.e., more PhD theater students.
(Which sort of brings the discussion full-circle.)
I read Ted Gioia a lot, and he complains about the sorry state of the environment for commercial artistic production. My take, though, is that commerce is one thing, and creative production another. We live in a time when there’s a tremendous opportunity for artistic creation by amateurs, rather than would-be professionals. I’d advise anyone interested in the arts at a young age to see amateurism as the highest expression of their talent. That is, literally, being motivated by one’s love of the creative activity should be the goal and reward. Becoming a “billionaire” is really not what you should be aiming for.
I agree. A major problem with a career in the arts by my observation that many many people are willing to do for free, or at best for a pittance, what you're trying to do to make a living. Of course you get what you pay for but in many instances people are happy to accept an inferior product for various reasons. Why hire a trained opera singer for a wedding when a relative with a reasonable voice will do it just to be included in the party, which drives down the amount the trained singers can charge and still get any gigs.
Bird outlines what I have always believed about criminal activity, especially on the violent side of it- the cause/effect has always been misinterpreted by social do-gooders. There simply isn't more than a very, very tiny fraction of armed robbers, as an example, with IQs above 95, and the ones who do have those higher IQs are the ones who are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol.
And how do Inquisitive Bird’s “insights” affect policing, prosecution and income transfer policies? We still need policing and prosecution that creates a pretty high presumption that if you commit a crime you will be arrested and prosecuted. And a more generous EITC, child allowance and unemployment benefit still make sense.
I can't read Bird's reasoning behind the firewall but I'm a little skeptical. While I expect mental disorders have some link to violence even if they make some people less violent. I'd be surprised if this explains a large percentage of crime. I can't see even that much of a link with intelligence. As for poverty, it seems pretty clear that bad circumstances lead to more violent crime. One only need look at the drug gangs to see how circumstances lead to violent crime.
At least in the Real Sciences you have other methods of cross checking abilities beyond just publications, citations, etc. and that is reproducible and accurate results and predictions.
I had a De-facto thesis adviser who had been canned for publish or perish from UC Berkeley and was out at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. He was the type whose reviews seemed to comeback with excellent research "accepted", but split it into 3 papers. My real adviser reviews were usually "major revisions" and his publications were masters of the LPU (least publishable unit). Upon my thesis completion, my real adviser didn't really understand what I was doing and just asked if "Larry" said it was OK and he signed it. It was clear who was the better scientists even when they didn't really like each other. Larry's results could be trusted to be valid and reproducible and could be used with confidence in calculating solution to real issues.
The other STEM options for high status ranking are related to creating a business using your own R&D results and make money. I used this option after a reviewer insulted me too much and I said the hell with publications half a century ago. I just used my research for my proprietary advantages.
"He was wrong about economic misfits needing the government. Many corkball players end up being absorbed as administrators in universities or nonprofit foundations."
Some people spend their entire working career as corkball players. Some people are never in that category. They are high-performers their whole career. Most of us are somewhere in between. It depends on both our work conditions and outside factors that affect our ability to focus on work. Whether we major in humanities, engineering, or something else makes little difference except it helps if the area of study fits our aptitude and interest.
Given that more and more of the few national parks the government is willing to fund are like, some place where a lynched person slept, or where migrant children were cruelly *given schooling* (!) or yet another monument to Harriet Tubman (apologies if one of these is your favorite park, I realize everything is someone’s favorite) - I think there are plenty of opportunities for a guy like that to get on with the NPS. It’s true he may not have meant to work that hard - e.g. every day, and in uniform - but arguably he will reach more people than he would in the classroom.
"…we sent so many Americans to college that we created a glut of educated workers. But when a country has fewer kids facing higher prices for a less valuable education, you’re probably going to see fewer people go to college. And that means less demand for professors in general."
This is absurd for multiple reasons:
We don't have a glut of educated workers. If anything, there is a shortage.
More people go to college when the job market is bad, less when it is good. It is good.
While the rate has gone down somewhat in the last ten years from an all-time high, the gross number of attendees has changed much less.
Demand for professors is down in large part because colleges are increasingly using non-professors to teach.
"We don't have a glut of educated workers. If anything, there is a shortage."
It is probably always true that there are never enough skillful, conscientious, educated workers. However, at the present moment, there are many more "people with degrees" than there are jobs that require degrees (and aren't just, "we used to say high school diploma required but that didn't screen out enough people so we now say college degree required). The Labor Department counts these people and graciously calls them "underemployed". There are millions of them. The college graduate working at Starbucks has become a cliche.
Fair point but I think that is a different issue. You have identified a pool of college graduates whose studies didn't prepare them for the available jobs, whether they studied the wrong things or otherwise didn't attain the needed skills. While that may be true, there is also a shortage of college grads to fill jobs in many areas.
I was going to say computer programming and engineering. K12 education also has a shortage but one could argue that's due to low pay. I figured I'd Google before saying that to see what else is on the list. Google AI showed a partial list with education and healthcare at the top. A global list put IT and engineering at the top. Monster's top ten has 5 with and 5 without degrees but the ones with are almost all higher on the list.
I went to the Monster list and was struck by how many aren't something that college prepares you for, e.g., drivers. And some I pushed back against. A friend in the IT industry was recently laid off and hasn't seen much out there (and this is in the Boston area!). Scientists will tell you how bad the job market is.
I'd love to see some figures. How many openings are there compared to how many "underemployed" graduates there are? My prior is that the latter is a lot bigger than the former.
”I went to the Monster list and was struck by how many aren't something that college prepares you for, e.g., drivers."
I ready agreed there was also a shortage of non-degreed workers, right? What is you point?
Did you notice the degreed worker shortages are mostly in the top half of the top ten and non-degreed mostly in the bottom half?
Why are you so resistant to the possibility that there is a shortage of degreed workers irregardless of underemployed degreed workers who don't have the needed skills?
Question: if you have jobs that don't really require skills learned in college but when you hire high school grads you get workers who are immature, don't show up, or have other bad habits more frequently than college grads that only cost a negligible amount or no more, who are you going to hire? If you find the high school grads aren't adequate to do the job, regardless of reason, doesn't that mean it requires college grads?
"The analogy I think best is that the few who can make a living solely by writing books are cultural billionaires. "
By one count there are 735 billionaires in the US. I'd bet there's at least 10x that many who make a living writing books.
"If you try to make a living as a fiction writer, a painter, a singer, or an actor, do not get your hopes up. "
Being nationally known or reaching the level similar to a major sport pro athlete is indeed a longshot but for those with talent and perseverance, making a living in these fields really isn't any more difficult than being a license lawyer, engineer, or surgeon. The difference is that schooling does a lot to sort out who has the needed aptitude and motivation in these other areas. (yes, the pay likely won't be as good for most in the arts but one can make a living)
"As I have said before and will say again, the whole system of incentives in academia ought to be redesigned."
Other than a few rather small tweaks that would likely still be difficult to implement widely, I have no idea what a better system would look like. Maybe you can write a piece on that. If you have and I've forgotten or just missed it, maybe someone can point me to it.
Noah Smith does not mention the transformation of so many humanities departments into race and gender obsessed ideological bastions. This helps explain both why they get fewer students and why white males don't get hired. There is still pressure on other non-humanities departments to go that route, at least in prestigious private universities and public universities in progressive states. Form a concentration of "diversity science" in your social science department, and all work will be DEI-friendly, not interesting, and not good.
Excellent essay on all this: https://socialimpurity.substack.com/p/dei-the-great-misunderstanding?utm_source=cross-post&publication_id=1487338&post_id=144489392&utm_campaign=618970&isFreemail=true&r=clcye&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
"Many corkball players end up being absorbed as administrators in universities or nonprofit foundations." Add the plethora of bureaucracies. In other words, your dad was essentially correct... still milking the taxpayer -- indirectly.
Given the way higher education funding is structured, they're still getting paid by the government. It's just laundered through the "higher ed" system, among other ways.
The omnipresent government "payroll". Tried and true means of subduing the population. The future's looking good !
Peer-review only really works when the result being published are from experiments that the reviewer and readers themselves can easily try to replicate. My field was organic/organo-metallic chemistry and biochemistry/medicinal chemistry. I reviewed a fair number of papers over the years, and in only a handful of them, all on organic/organometallic side (maybe 10 out of 100 or so papers reviewed) was it possible for me to attempt to replicate the experiment in the laboratory, and I did so in those cases, and all of those were legitimate results- the other 90 or so papers were biochemical/medicinal chemistry papers that weren't possible for me to attempt to replicate because to do so would cost thousands or more dollars and would involve the participation of more than just myself. In those papers I would just study them to make sure there were no obvious errors or fabrications, but the truth is you never really know whether or not you are reading a fraud.
In short, you are likely to find more fraud the more difficult it is to try to replicate the experiment. A paper that claims a particular chemical transformation is usually easy to replicate for any chemist with lab, and my experience is that there are very few such fraudulent/mistaken papers in peer-reviewed journals. I can't imagine what it is like in fields like sociology and economics.
Ever since the Pell Grant program, aren't all accredited colleges that take federal student loans the beneficiary of massive subsidies? I think they are playing corkball with taxpayer money.
Like, if the government got in the business of auto loans so that everyone who wants to drive a car could afford one, car dealerships would see a massive increase in demand for their inventory and would be able to start ratcheting up prices and enjoying the benefits of that subsidy.
"Corkball" made me think of our former governor, Michael Dukakis. He ran for president in 1988 with a slogan of "good jobs for good wages". Being a liberal Democrat that basically meant going to college. But that prescription runs up against the fact that, at least in 1988, there just weren't enough well-paying "indoor work, no heavy lifting" jobs that required a college degree. So what could bring job supply up to demand?
A lot of things. None of them with a stated purpose to provide those jobs--but they gave lots of people a good feeling because they sensed they had that effect. And so there was damn little pushback. Add lots of administrators to higher ed. Encourage foundations and other non-profits. Add regulation after regulation, so there is a big market for "compliance officers" and related people. Voila. Demand meets supply. To quote Arnold, a self-licking ice cream cone.
It was bipartisan in my view. Republicans were just as culpable in encouraging vast numbers of largely unqualified people to load themselves up with debt to obtain a degree that was either useless or underutilized. The GOPe is still fighting tooth and nail to keep the party from actually shifting to promotion of skills-based training and workers (what some people like to denigrate as 'populism')
When I'm feeling charitable, I think Republicans actually believed the bullsh*t: a college degree makes you successful, and anyone can get a college degree if they can afford it, so the government should help people afford it.
When I'm feeling less charitable, I think they just went along because they knew opposition was a vote loser. And there was no creativity, no attempt to break the cycle of "federal aid goes up, tuition and fees go up a similar amount, so people still have trouble affording it." Also, no attempt to get the money-receiving institutions to channel students into programs which would be remunerative after they graduate--or to develop such programs in the first place. (I suppose the cynic would say that for the lower half of the bell curve, there can be no such college program.)
Re: "the whole system of incentives in academia ought to be redesigned."
Was the system of incentives in academia ever "designed"?
Who would redesign the system? A State legislature or governor for a State public university system? A prestigious group of private universities (say, the Ivies)? A visionary group of private colleges who lack prestige but who champion "value added"? Others?
It's hard to discern an archimedean point with sufficient incentive to change the system of incentives.
Alternatives might be:
(a) Disruption, either by new colleges or by entrepreneurial creation of new "signaling" mechanisms for employment.
(b) Some sort of market drift or organizational evolution as consumers exit.
My thought on that was that so long as there is a pile of government funding going to academia there can't be a realignment of incentives towards better science. Normally, I would expect that end users of the research would start changing incentives, or changing research providers, but I think at root the vast majority of academic research doesn't have end users outside of government grants and political requests. Even things like medical research isn't so much used by companies to improve health as much as market things they have researched in house, and those few that do get worked on in academia are a tiny sliver of what gets time and money spent on it.
So I think so long as we consider "basic research" to be a public good the government needs to throw money at we are going to get a lot of research that is bad.
"My thought on that was that so long as there is a pile of government funding going to academia there can't be a realignment of incentives towards better science.”
This. Free money corrupts everything it touches. I’ll say it once again: Follow the money!
I worked in the professional theater for a bit right out of college. But it didn’t take me long to figure out a couple of things:
1) success was only very loosely correlated to talent and hard work. One of the best actors I worked with struggled to find success; one of the more-successful wasn’t exceptionally talented but fit an archetype that gave him some level of success.
2) there’s a high degree of variability. The *best* actor I worked with is now more-or-less a household name. But he was in his, I think, late 30s before he began to find that success, otherwise working in relative obscurity for, what?, 20 years?
Put both of these things together and there just isn’t a reliable enough path to success in the arts for anyone who has ability in more conventional areas to pick it as a career. But…
3) the one thing I could have done is become a college professor. I applied and got into a few good grad schools. But what was the future there? Getting paid to produce nothing particularly of value, i.e., more PhD theater students.
(Which sort of brings the discussion full-circle.)
I read Ted Gioia a lot, and he complains about the sorry state of the environment for commercial artistic production. My take, though, is that commerce is one thing, and creative production another. We live in a time when there’s a tremendous opportunity for artistic creation by amateurs, rather than would-be professionals. I’d advise anyone interested in the arts at a young age to see amateurism as the highest expression of their talent. That is, literally, being motivated by one’s love of the creative activity should be the goal and reward. Becoming a “billionaire” is really not what you should be aiming for.
I agree. A major problem with a career in the arts by my observation that many many people are willing to do for free, or at best for a pittance, what you're trying to do to make a living. Of course you get what you pay for but in many instances people are happy to accept an inferior product for various reasons. Why hire a trained opera singer for a wedding when a relative with a reasonable voice will do it just to be included in the party, which drives down the amount the trained singers can charge and still get any gigs.
Bird outlines what I have always believed about criminal activity, especially on the violent side of it- the cause/effect has always been misinterpreted by social do-gooders. There simply isn't more than a very, very tiny fraction of armed robbers, as an example, with IQs above 95, and the ones who do have those higher IQs are the ones who are addicted to drugs and/or alcohol.
And how do Inquisitive Bird’s “insights” affect policing, prosecution and income transfer policies? We still need policing and prosecution that creates a pretty high presumption that if you commit a crime you will be arrested and prosecuted. And a more generous EITC, child allowance and unemployment benefit still make sense.
I can't read Bird's reasoning behind the firewall but I'm a little skeptical. While I expect mental disorders have some link to violence even if they make some people less violent. I'd be surprised if this explains a large percentage of crime. I can't see even that much of a link with intelligence. As for poverty, it seems pretty clear that bad circumstances lead to more violent crime. One only need look at the drug gangs to see how circumstances lead to violent crime.
At least in the Real Sciences you have other methods of cross checking abilities beyond just publications, citations, etc. and that is reproducible and accurate results and predictions.
I had a De-facto thesis adviser who had been canned for publish or perish from UC Berkeley and was out at Lawrence Livermore Laboratories. He was the type whose reviews seemed to comeback with excellent research "accepted", but split it into 3 papers. My real adviser reviews were usually "major revisions" and his publications were masters of the LPU (least publishable unit). Upon my thesis completion, my real adviser didn't really understand what I was doing and just asked if "Larry" said it was OK and he signed it. It was clear who was the better scientists even when they didn't really like each other. Larry's results could be trusted to be valid and reproducible and could be used with confidence in calculating solution to real issues.
The other STEM options for high status ranking are related to creating a business using your own R&D results and make money. I used this option after a reviewer insulted me too much and I said the hell with publications half a century ago. I just used my research for my proprietary advantages.
"He was wrong about economic misfits needing the government. Many corkball players end up being absorbed as administrators in universities or nonprofit foundations."
Some people spend their entire working career as corkball players. Some people are never in that category. They are high-performers their whole career. Most of us are somewhere in between. It depends on both our work conditions and outside factors that affect our ability to focus on work. Whether we major in humanities, engineering, or something else makes little difference except it helps if the area of study fits our aptitude and interest.
Given that more and more of the few national parks the government is willing to fund are like, some place where a lynched person slept, or where migrant children were cruelly *given schooling* (!) or yet another monument to Harriet Tubman (apologies if one of these is your favorite park, I realize everything is someone’s favorite) - I think there are plenty of opportunities for a guy like that to get on with the NPS. It’s true he may not have meant to work that hard - e.g. every day, and in uniform - but arguably he will reach more people than he would in the classroom.
"…we sent so many Americans to college that we created a glut of educated workers. But when a country has fewer kids facing higher prices for a less valuable education, you’re probably going to see fewer people go to college. And that means less demand for professors in general."
This is absurd for multiple reasons:
We don't have a glut of educated workers. If anything, there is a shortage.
More people go to college when the job market is bad, less when it is good. It is good.
While the rate has gone down somewhat in the last ten years from an all-time high, the gross number of attendees has changed much less.
Demand for professors is down in large part because colleges are increasingly using non-professors to teach.
"We don't have a glut of educated workers. If anything, there is a shortage."
It is probably always true that there are never enough skillful, conscientious, educated workers. However, at the present moment, there are many more "people with degrees" than there are jobs that require degrees (and aren't just, "we used to say high school diploma required but that didn't screen out enough people so we now say college degree required). The Labor Department counts these people and graciously calls them "underemployed". There are millions of them. The college graduate working at Starbucks has become a cliche.
Fair point but I think that is a different issue. You have identified a pool of college graduates whose studies didn't prepare them for the available jobs, whether they studied the wrong things or otherwise didn't attain the needed skills. While that may be true, there is also a shortage of college grads to fill jobs in many areas.
I am surprised to hear that. What jobs in what areas?
I was going to say computer programming and engineering. K12 education also has a shortage but one could argue that's due to low pay. I figured I'd Google before saying that to see what else is on the list. Google AI showed a partial list with education and healthcare at the top. A global list put IT and engineering at the top. Monster's top ten has 5 with and 5 without degrees but the ones with are almost all higher on the list.
https://www.monster.com/career-advice/article/shrm-industries-need-more-workers-1216
I went to the Monster list and was struck by how many aren't something that college prepares you for, e.g., drivers. And some I pushed back against. A friend in the IT industry was recently laid off and hasn't seen much out there (and this is in the Boston area!). Scientists will tell you how bad the job market is.
I'd love to see some figures. How many openings are there compared to how many "underemployed" graduates there are? My prior is that the latter is a lot bigger than the former.
”I went to the Monster list and was struck by how many aren't something that college prepares you for, e.g., drivers."
I ready agreed there was also a shortage of non-degreed workers, right? What is you point?
Did you notice the degreed worker shortages are mostly in the top half of the top ten and non-degreed mostly in the bottom half?
Why are you so resistant to the possibility that there is a shortage of degreed workers irregardless of underemployed degreed workers who don't have the needed skills?
Question: if you have jobs that don't really require skills learned in college but when you hire high school grads you get workers who are immature, don't show up, or have other bad habits more frequently than college grads that only cost a negligible amount or no more, who are you going to hire? If you find the high school grads aren't adequate to do the job, regardless of reason, doesn't that mean it requires college grads?
There are equally large labor shortages among skilled labor professions.
Roughly speaking, that is true. I was referring to this statement, "we sent so many Americans to college that we created a glut of educated workers."
"The analogy I think best is that the few who can make a living solely by writing books are cultural billionaires. "
By one count there are 735 billionaires in the US. I'd bet there's at least 10x that many who make a living writing books.
"If you try to make a living as a fiction writer, a painter, a singer, or an actor, do not get your hopes up. "
Being nationally known or reaching the level similar to a major sport pro athlete is indeed a longshot but for those with talent and perseverance, making a living in these fields really isn't any more difficult than being a license lawyer, engineer, or surgeon. The difference is that schooling does a lot to sort out who has the needed aptitude and motivation in these other areas. (yes, the pay likely won't be as good for most in the arts but one can make a living)
"As I have said before and will say again, the whole system of incentives in academia ought to be redesigned."
Other than a few rather small tweaks that would likely still be difficult to implement widely, I have no idea what a better system would look like. Maybe you can write a piece on that. If you have and I've forgotten or just missed it, maybe someone can point me to it.