The game of musical chairs is simple: there are N chairs and N+1 people. Music plays. When the music stops, you find a seat. Whomever didn’t find a seat is out.
If you want to get better at musical chairs, you can practice being faster at running for the empty chairs, you can practice your reaction time (so that you start sprinting the moment the music stops), you can practice your chair awareness to make the split second decision of which chair to go for, you can practice shoving people in a way that the umpire doesn’t punish.
And, yet, at the end of the game, someone will be without a seat. Getting better at musical chairs is purely zero-sum. If anything, it’s negative sum: we could all spend hours doing chair drills and—at the end of the day—the result is the same, someone is standing and everyone else is sitting down. All we can hope for is that we are not the one who can’t sit.
If you add another chair, the game changes. You can take your time, walk leisurely to your chair when the music stops. Stop for a coffee, even, that chair will be waiting for you.
This is obviously, a post about NIMBYism and avocado toastism (the belief that young people just need to stop eating avocado toast1 and save for a house). In a game of musical chairs, being faster can get you a chair, but it will always be at the expense of someone else. The only way to change the game is to get more chairs (build more housing).
This is also a post about academic careers. From inside the game, it is tempting to think that we could change the superficial elements of the game (how fast we run, which music is being played) and this would remove the pressure. But, if the game stays the same, there will always be someone who is standing without a seat at the end. There will always be someone who worked 10 years for a career that was unceremoniously closed off to them.
I think a lot of anxiety about scientific journals and grants, about what is valued and not valued, comes from the fundamental nature of the game we have set up for ourselves. If we move towards less reliance on journal names, towards less reliance on publications tout court, but stick with a system where there are many more applicants than tenure-track positions, we will just move the selection to somewhere else. We can tweak the grant system to no end, but as long as success rates are single-digit percentages, it won’t get better. We can make the selections less legible, more reliant on personal connections (as if systems reliant on personal connections were inherently less stressful for the participants), but the selection will be there. This will benefit some and harm others. Any time, we value something more, something else is valued less. And if something becomes valued, Goodhart’s Law applies and it will soon be gamed, and strategically employed and a major source of stress for all involved.
We need to change the game: have more chairs2 or fewer players. When it comes to science funding, more chairs means more funding and that is obviously a good idea, but even that would be a short-term fix if the game stays the same, always enrolling more players than there are chairs. For academic careers, we should stop the up or out system.
In the case of housing, legalizing it would certainly be a much more productive avenue to solve the problem than the constant fights about who should have the right to an artificially-limited resource.