First Person

Trusting the System

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By B. Ho

I'm sorry. I know that is an odd opening, but I would like to apologize to all those offended by my first column. Judging from the antagonistic reader response to it, certain readers felt I was guilty of false modesty and worse. Perhaps if you knew me better you wouldn't feel that way. But since you don't, I'm sorry.

My dissertation in economics is about apologies, so I can't help but analyze any that arise. Once you start looking, you notice them everywhere. The apology I began with is an attempt to restore a relationship with the readers, to create positive personal affect and good will. It has credibility because the admission of culpability demonstrates fallibility. It also demonstrates an acceptance of common rules of conduct by acknowledging the existence of the transgression. To see that argument made using arcane Greek symbols, I refer you to my paper.

I am well-aware that those first two paragraphs won't be especially effective at changing your opinion about me. The limitations of the printed word, coupled with the fancy verbiage of academic prose, mean only minimal efficacy. At least I can try.

I wrote my first column without really expecting it to be published, so it was mostly personal thoughts intended for close friends and family. I didn't really consider the impression it would leave on complete strangers who would use it to make judgments about my character.

Shortly before my article was published there was another First-Person columnist who cautioned job-search candidates against posting overly personal information on their blogs and warned that search committees could use that information to torpedo certain applications.

So I agonized over whether to use my real name for this column. I imagined some incensed hiring committee member denying my candidacy because of some tidbit he read in The Chronicle. Would my column lead some search-committee member to form a negative impression, leaving me with no opportunity to complete the picture?

The whole experience has led me to ponder the objectivity of the hiring process.

In my first column, I rattled off a long list of accomplishments. To some readers, that list made my anxieties sound fake. What I neglected to emphasize -- perhaps because it was so evident to me -- is that my accomplishments are matched by my peers and count for practically nothing in the job search.

I have yet to meet a single professor who was impressed by lines on my CV; they only care about the quality of my research and my fit as a colleague. The problem is that at such an early stage in my career, those things are difficult to predict.

Social psychologists tell us that people tend to be overconfident about judgments made with very little information. The job-search process seems especially arbitrary. Should evaluators base their decisions -- even in part -- on fleeting impressions? Should how we dress at an interview, or something we wrote in a newspaper column determine our future career?

I have personal experience on both sides. I got a job at a Wall Street investment bank based largely on my ability to answer a brain teaser at an interview. Once hired, I helped reject an applicant during my first week on the job, based on a 15-minute conversation.

Malcolm Gladwell, the celebrity social-science popularizer, calls it "blink," the ability to assess a great deal about a person or situation in the blink of an eye, often with great accuracy. The problem arises when that first impression is exactly wrong. The economist Claudia Goldin describes how professional symphony orchestras hired very few women until blind auditions became standard practice.

At a book signing of Gladwell's that I attended, a very prominent social psychologist remarked that he had tried to convince his department that hiring decisions should be based 90 percent on the scholarship of the candidate alone. A score should be reported before meeting the candidate in person, before "blink" judgments could bias decision making.

My mom (who put her own Ph.D. to work in the computer consulting industry and sometimes wishes I did the same) always told me that in the real world perception matters as much as substance. Only in the ivory tower does one have the luxury of having your efforts evaluated according to objective criteria.

Yet could I count on objective evaluation of my application when even academic assessment of scholarship can be subjective? The subjectivity is amplified by the fact that search committees looking to hire new junior faculty members aren't just trying to assess their existing research, but a far more nebulous quality -- their potential to do good research. How much will external cues and perceptions skew how my application is evaluated?

I have met heterodox economists who consider the whole establishment to be corrupt, a cartel that sets standards of good scholarship based on relationships and personal biases. The referee process, as we all know, is never truly blind.

Economists at least feel that we are somehow more objective than the literary theorists and other "softies" who appear to us to have completely arbitrary standards of quality. We envy the stark mathematical rigor of physical scientists, who seem immune to such concerns as nonobjectivity. (Even so, from talking to my physicist roommate, it seems scientists have their own issues of politics interfering with the search for truth. True objectivity seems to be a generally elusive quantity.)

Despite all this, I still have sufficient trust in the system to use my real name for this column. Perhaps I am just naïve. Perhaps it is my economics-bred faith in markets. Perhaps it is just latent Confucianism in my upbringing. Yet in the end, I trust that there is a rational Weberian bureaucratic system for allocating applicants to jobs. I have to believe that the people in the system are doing their best to excise bias, so that each applicant is evaluated fairly and efficiently using the information available.

And despite whatever I inadvertently projected in my last column, I don't consider myself any better than my competition.

We each have our individual strengths and weaknesses, and we are all worried about the arbitrariness of the job search. At least those of us who study economics can take small comfort that our theory predicts that markets should operate efficiently. Markets may have noise and occasional misallocations, but we should be compensated for the unfairness and the risk. Furthermore, markets, even job markets, lead to optimal matches, at least in the long run. Unfortunately I also can't help but be reminded of the Keynes quote: "In the long run, we're all dead."

In any case, application packets go out next week. Good luck to us all.