LHS: Fair enough.
[DENTON]: So it’s not so clear.
LHS: It’s not clear at all. I think I said it wasn’t clear. I was giving you my best guess but I hope we could argue on the basis of as much evidence as we can marshal.
[DENTON]: It’s here.
LHS: No, no, no. Let me say. I have actually read that and I’m not saying there aren’t rooms to debate this in, but if somebody, but with the greatest respect-I think there’s an enormous amount one can learn from the papers in this conference and from those two books—but if somebody thinks that there is proof in these two books, that these phenomenon are caused by something else, I guess I would very respectfully have to disagree very very strongly with that. I don’t presume to have proved any view that I expressed here, but if you think there is proof for an alternative theory, I’d want you to be hesitant about that.
Q: Just one quick question in terms of the data. We saw this morning lots of data showing the drop in white males entering science and engineering, and I’m having trouble squaring that with your model of who wants to work eighty hours a week. It’s mostly people coming from other countries that have filled that gap in terms of men versus women.
LHS: I think there are two different things, frankly, actually, is my guess—I’m not an expert. Somebody reported to me that—someone who is knowledgeable—said that it is surprisingly hard to get Americans rather than immigrants or the children of immigrants to be cardiac surgeons. Cardiac surgeon is about prestigious, certain kind of prestige as you can be, fact is that people want control of their lifestyles, people want flexibility, they don’t want to do it, and it’s disproportionately immigrants that want to do some of the careers that are most demanding in terms of time and most interfering with your lifestyle. So I think that’s exactly right and I think it’s precisely the package of number of hours’ work what it is, that’s leading more Americans to choose to have careers of one kind or another in business that are less demanding of passionate thought all the time and that includes white males as well.
Q: That’s my point, that social-psychological in nature [unintelligible].
LHS: I would actually much rather stay—yes, and then I’m on my way out.
Q: I have no idea how you would evaluate the productivity of the marginal hire if this person is coming into an environment where [unintelligible] is marginal and there’s [unintelligible].
LHS: You’re absolutely right. You’re absolutely right. I used the term—I realized I had not spoken carefully—I used the term marginal in the economic sense to mean, only additional, to only mean...
Q: [unintelligible].
LHS: No, to mean only the additional [unintelligible]. Yeah, obviously [unintelligible] going to identify X is the additional hire, is the marginal hire, the question you can ask is, you know, here is a time when, as a consequence of an effort, there was a very substantial increase in the number of people who were hired in a given group, what was the observed ex post quality? And what was the observed ex post performance? It’s hard to believe that that’s not a useful thing to try to know. It may well be that one will produce powerful evidence that the people are much better than the people who were there and that the institutions went up in quality and that made things much better. All I’m saying is one needs to ask the question. And as for the groping in the kitchen, and whatnot, look, it’s absolutely important that in every university in America there be norms of civility and proper treatment of colleagues that be absolutely established and that that be true universally, and that’s a hugely important part of this, and that’s why at Harvard we’re doing a whole set of things that are making junior faculty positions much more real faculty positions with real mentoring, real feedback, serious searches before the people are hired, and much greater prospects for tenure than there ever have been before because exactly that kind of collegiality is absolutely central to the academic enterprise.
Thank you.