“In summary, we have more people, better connected than ever, will face increasing pressure to produce in specialized sub fields with less financial security over shorter periods”. Why do you think researchers positions are unpaid enough in academia compared to other jobs that require similar skills? And is there anything that can be done to change the current situation?

Sabine Hossenfelder is an author and theoretical physicist working on the foundations of physics. To be more precise she describes herself as a phenomenologist rather than a theorist. She is a Research Fellow at the Frankfurt Institute for Advanced Studies where she leads the Superfluid Dark Matter group. She is the author of ‘Lost in Math: How Beauty Leads Physics Astray’, which explores the concept of elegance in fundamental physics and cosmology. More importantly she’s an outstanding science communicator, who has attracted a huge audience on her YouTube channel, where she publishes explanatory videos on topics related to physics.

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SL. Yeah, so you’re basically saying being honest doesn’t really pay back, you need to be able to sell this need to make people dream. Last thing I wanted to ask you is about... at p age 156 you say that, “in summary, we have more people, better connected than ever, will face increasing pressure to produce in specialized sub fields with less financial security over shorter periods”, which is kind of depressing. Why do you think researchers positions are unpaid enough in academia compared to other jobs that require similar skills? And is there anything that can be done to change the current situation?

SH. More money? But where’s the money supposed to come from? So maybe I should say that this sentence, which you just quoted, that’s a summary of me going through various statistics and data and so on and so forth. So all the references are in the book.

A lot of academia thrives on cheap and easily replaceable, postdoc positions and those people are basically burned through.

I think I’m allowed to say this, because technically, I’m still a postdoc. I guess, it’s all supply and demand. There are just so many people queuing up for these postdoc positions that you can keep the salary really low. Even if the salary is okay, then fairly often, these may be positions without benefits. So there’ll be scholarships, usually that’s tax free, which makes them super cheap for the institutions. But then the people will not have health insurance, they will not have life insurance. If someone happens to get pregnant, that’s a problem. They’re not good jobs to have. For example, I mean, I’ve had like a whole series of these positions. One of the problems, which you only notice as you get older is that they don’t have any pension plans. So it’s one of the problems that you pile up, you know. Other people at my age do have some kind of pension plan. I’ve pretty much lost, like 15 years of my life. Maybe that’s a very German thing to worry about. But I mean, it matters to me.

I mean, what can we do? What can be done about it? There are lots of proposals that people have made, for example, one thing that comes back over and over again is that we should be stricter in deciding early on how many people we should allow to even continue on to postdoc positions, so that pretty much all of them could land on a tenure place.

It’s just not workable, because the people who are now on these tenure positions, they live from these cheap postdocs, so they’re never going to approve it.

There are certainly things that you can do about the benefits, and especially in Germany is, as I keep saying, maybe that’s a very German thing, so for the Germans, this is like really important. I also know that this a thing in Sweden, I’ve been in Sweden for like six years, the National funding agencies have a policy that they will only fund postdocs if they have decent employment contracts. If you get money from them, you’re not allowed to put the postdocs on a scholarship, even though, in that case, you might be able to hire twice as many people. That’s roughly as a rule of thumb. That’s the difference that we’re talking about. So there are, you know, there are little improvements here and there. But I guess the big change isn’t happening.