J. Bradford DeLong: Professor of Economics, Emeritus
“Retirement” & the great life simplification from simply dropping bureaucratic-administrative tasks—plus, on another dimension, stochastic-parrot AI-autocomplete—all promise great life improvement. But there is a danger: the sea-squirt problem…
UC Berkeley has one of the last surviving defined benefit pension plans in existence. That means it makes no financial or lifestyel sense for me not to “retire” today. In fact, it made no financial sense for me not to retire a year ago. And two years ago, it was in the balance. So perhaps this move is two years late. For now:
My net income goes up.
My administrative-bureaucratic workload goes down from something like 10 hours a week to as close to zero as I can possibly make it.
My teaching load goes down by about a third, for now.
All-in-all, a win, no?
But there is a potential danger. Consider the sea squirt:
The sea squirt starts out as a tadpole with a spinal cord and a brain. It swims around, looking for a good rock. It finds one. It cements itself in place.
And then it eats its brain.
Movement achieved, problem solved, brain surplus to requirements, lunch is served.
I do not want to become an adult sea squirt.
But without the load of administrative and bureaucratic work, a good deal of which needs to be done face-to-face and with less teaching. All of these getting me up to campus less often is not this a danger?
So that means that I have to, starting today:
Sign up and schedule myself to give more talks
Sign up and schedue myself to attend more talks and more conferences and more meetings—Bodega Bay July 8-10, here I come!
Find a coffee shop where lots of professors come by to caffeinate up—people who I want to talk to who I can run into there by accident and buttonhole.
Decide what to do with this SubStack.
My instinct right now is that I should raise the time allocation I commit to it to more than the current one hour a day. (Okay: one hour a day, plus time spent procrastinating when I have something else to do, plus using it as an outlet for drafts and for dropped projects and tasks that I have been working on in the rest of my writing and calculating time.)
What should I do with an extra two hours a day (for now, starting now) devoted to this platform? Advice very much appreciated, and much more than welcome.