The Global Migration (or not) of Scholars and Researchers
In this column, although I will first make an announcement that is all about me, I will quickly explain the potential broader significance of the news, which will then allow me to return to a question that I posed last week about the absence of a "higher education gold rush" in 2025. In short, I am still trying to figure out why -- even in the most promising environment in history for non-US universities to pick off American researchers and thus boost their own absolute and relative stature -- no one seems to be pursuing that winning strategy.
But first, the personal news. Some Dorf on Law readers will surely recall that I have been moving around the non-US world for the past few years, most recently moving to Dublin, Ireland this past Spring. There will soon be some updates about all of that, but today's news is not about permanently relocating to a new place. Instead, I am happy to announce that I have accepted an offer to become a Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Austrian and International Tax Law (IATL), which is part of the Vienna University of Business and Economics (WU). The short, official announcement went up on the institute's website a bit more than a week ago, noting that Dr. Simon Whitehead is also joining the staff with the title of Senior Research Fellow.
I am genuinely excited about this, but again, this does not involve my moving permanently to Vienna (as delightful as that idea would be). The appointment brings with it the opportunity to be in residence at the Institute at my discretion, but because there is no special visa status involved, the usual rules and limitations regarding visits to a European country apply. Still, it is hardly a small thing to have a standing invitation to spend weeks or months at a time in one of the most beautiful cities in the world, while working at one of the most vibrant research universities out there.
But wait, one might say. Did this column not begin with my reassertion that the new US reality in 2025 is not causing academic institutions elsewhere to seek out American scholars, or for American scholars to seek out positions abroad? Does this announcement not contradict that statement? Actually, no.
The driving force behind the Institute is Univ.-Prof. Dr. DDr. h. c. Michael Lang, who has been a tireless and dynamic leader in making the tax program at WU what it is today. And for present purposes, the key fact is that Professor Lang has been doing this for many years, which means that his moves this year (which also included signing up my former University of Florida colleague Yariv Brauner as a Professor of Tax Law at WU) are unsurprising and not at all unusual. One might be able to find a bit of a difference in what has happened this year compared to prior years, or maybe not, but the fact is that successful global scholarly outreach has been standard operating procedure at the Institute for many years.
Similarly, I have been a visitor in Vienna at least five times over the past fifteen years, teaching mini-courses and spending time there as a visiting scholar. Therefore, it would be easy to imagine myself making today's announcement even if the US's universities were not under unprecedented political pressure. Professor Lang and I almost surely would have done this around now, no matter what else was happening in the world. Moreover, as I noted in my column last week, I would not in fact be one of the nuggets in an academic gold rush, given my age and emeritus status. If there were evidence of such a rush, it would have to involve younger people in large enough numbers to stop relying on anecdotes.
Which brings us back to the question: Why is what is not happening not happening? The closest I came to answering that question last week was the cynical comment that
politicians and university leaders in other countries are shockingly parochial and do not see this situation as a reason to make changes of any kind, much less of the sort that would rock any boats. I have to admit that I have personally noticed this attitude in spades in many places that one might hope would be more ambitious and forward-looking.
I added a second possible explanation having to do with the relatively low pay and poor working conditions at non-US universities, but that explanation immediately leads to a followup question: If the new reality in US higher education makes American scholars more likely to listen to lateral offers from abroad, why would foreign universities not take the opportunity to load up a few truckloads of these scholars on the cheap?
Put differently, this is merely another example of the kind of question that orthodox economists often ask: Phenomenon X, which makes sense and therefore should be happening, isn't happening; so why is the market failing? That is, something must be stopping people from reaching win-win (Pareto-improving) exchanges, because people do not leave money on the table for no reason.
I want to be clear that I find that default style of reasoning among orthodox economists to be tiring and often downright silly. It has even inspired some not-particularly-funny jokes, such as: "An economist saw a $100 bill on the sidewalk but didn't pick it up, because he knew it was counterfeit. Why? Because he knew that if it were real, someone would have picked it up already." So yes, the "but it should be happening" instinct is reductive and can be overdone (and has been ... to death).
And it is especially annoying to go down that path because the "answer" to the question of why something good is not happening is almost always "because government." Those nasty politicians and bureaucrats are always the villains in these stories, because they refuse to listen to the wise reactionary economists. There has been some movement in the last generation or so toward "behavioral" explanations based on cognitive biases like myopia or other challenges to the rational actor model, but that has mostly turned out to be an analytical and real-world dud.
What would the blame-the-government answer be to my question about the absence of an academic mass migration? The obvious explanation is that politicians in non-US countries are refusing to rise to the moment, failing to invest in an extremely valuable asset for their countries even at relatively bargain-basement prices. That answer sounds right, but of course we then need to know why politicians are not jumping for joy. And the answer to that is obvious: "I'm going to direct a bunch of my taxpayers' money to hire some fancy-pants intellectuals from the United States and pay them more than we typically pay our own professors" is not a winning political message. Yes, "the government" is failing to exploit an opportunity, but that must surely be because politicians know that their people would be against it. Democracy and all that.
As an analogy, a friend in the UK pointed out in conversation yesterday that Ireland is not in NATO. (Three other EU members -- Austria, Cyprus, and Malta -- are also not in NATO, all of which was news to me.) Apparently not entirely as a hypothetical question, my friend asked what would happen if Russia started military action or made threats of military action against Ireland. Who has the most direct interest in stopping such a move -- other than the 5.4 million Irish citizens who, and I am not making this up, currently have a navy with a total of eight ships (for an island nation), only four of which were available for operations this year -- and has the military might to do so? Answers: the UK and France. But as my friend put it: "Imagine how that would go over with British and French voters. 'We're defending Ireland, even though we're not required to do so.'"
And that hypothetical situation involves much higher stakes, with a much more immediate payoff. Why would we think that a truly effective strategy to build up a country's universities would suddenly be passed and funded? At best, the most that we might be able to expect is a slight uptick in some funding in a few places, probably not to be renewed.
Anyway, even though I now know that Austria is also not covered by NATO's Article 5, the news that I announced at the top of this column is still exciting.
- Neil H. Buchanan