“The only way I can get a pay rise is by trying to get an outside job offer. I want to be a really good University of Michigan professor. I want to be loyal. That means I'm doing a whole lot of things that are unlikely to make another university make me a job offer. So if what I want is the highest wage rise, what I'm going to do instead is go to a whole bunch of conferences and just tell people, I don't know if you've noticed this lately, but I'm really underpaid.”

Let me tell you the extreme version of the sort of job market you're worried about, which is I teach at a large state university, the University of Michigan. Every year they give the faculty a rise that they pretend is a merit rise, but is actually just roundabout. It always tends to be the inflation rate plus or minus a percentage point. And then you might say, well, that's but apart from that, and when you get promoted to professor, you basically don't get wage rises, or maybe you get a percent here or a percent there, or sometimes the university's poor and it doesn't give a percent and you fall behind. But it turns out, if I were to go to the university and say that Princeton just offered me a job and it was offering me $50,000 more, the university would that afternoon match the job offer. The only way I, or tell me to go, the only way I can get a pay rise is by trying to get an outside job offer. The real world's not quite that stark, but I think that starkness gives you a sense of it. And it does create some really weird things, right? So I want to be a really good University of Michigan professor. I want to be loyal. I want to help the students. That means I'm doing a whole lot of things that are unlikely to make another university make me a…