If you’re going to criticize a behavior pattern as economically irrational–but it continues in the face of seemingly incontrovertible evidence that it’s self-defeating, even borderline delusional–you need to come up with a theory to explain why (a) it’s actually not irrational, it just seems that way; (b) the incontrovertible evidence has big holes in it; or (c) yes, it’s irrational and yes, the evidence fully supports that, but people persist in doing it because: _____________.
So it would seem to be with the fact that people continue to apply to law school in droves despite how the economics of that decision have changed from “probably advantageous” to “preposterous unless you know you can get into a Tier 1 school and do quite well there.”
Give Prof. Paul Campos credit for taking on this very challenge over at “Inside the Law School Scam,” in “What’s the matter with 0Ls?“
Some of the reasons people always went to law school haven’t changed, of course, including the nice respectable intellectual and social patina it lends graduates. This is putting aside whether law schools are intellectually serious venues, which Prof. Campos violently disputes, and putting aside whether law school teaches anything about actual practice, which is all but universally acknowledged to be not-so and even, among some people including yours truly, not actually something they would be remotely suited to accomplish if they wanted to.
Prof. Campos cites a few other reasons people may continue to apply to law school despite evidence to the contrary, including:
- Never underestimate the capacity of some people to just hear what they want to hear.
- It’s a form of conspicuous consumption, which as we’ve known since the days of Veblen if not earlier, requires no economic rationale and indeed is immune from same.
- For “those from less exalted backgrounds,” it can be the equivalent of buying a lottery ticket while postponing the day of reckoning with their tough economic prospects. He charmingly analogizes this to “advising somebody in a terrible marriage to have a baby in order to turn things around.”
But my favorite is:
Our culture combines statistical innumeracy with the ideology of the Protestant work ethic in a way that makes people tend to be extremely risk-seeking …. People believe that if they just “work hard” everything will work out, because they have been told this from a very young age, and also because they want desperately to believe it’s true.
I bow to no one in my surpassing belief in the value of working hard–having come by it honestly as a Protestant of several generations’ lineage–but you can’t believe it will do you good to work furiously at the wrong things. Nevertheless, this remains my favorite explanation of all.
What we have here is yet another chapter in the ongoing debate between today’s two primary conceptions of economics (warning: generalization coming): The classical view of rational homo economicus making his utility-maximizing decisions based on sober assessments of all available information and suitably discounted into present values; vs. the behavioral-economics view of humans as subject to a variety of systematic flaws in their decision-making process, including (a very partial list): Irrational loss aversion, errors in “framing” and in “anchoring,” a bias for the status quo, indulgence in the fallacy of sunk costs, and remarkably poor intertemporal decision-making.
I submit that the classical, rational view really has no explanation for why we continue to see so many people applying to law school, so I have to vote for the behavioral explanations. To do otherwise would be: Irrational.
