During the second world war, between April 1943 and October 1944, the most important French linguist of his time, Emile Benveniste, was a Jewish refugee in Switzerland. He arrived in Swiss territory after four years in hiding in occupied France in his efforts to escape the Nazis. During this period, a PhD student in Fribourg wrote a letter to Benveniste, asking him about his research and his opinion about a problem in Indo-European linguistics. At first, Benveniste answered his colleague, but at the end of the letter he was forced to admit that it was a long time since he last had the opportunity to work on his research quietly and constantly and with a well-equipped library, so he was not sure about the answer. All his thoughts and his attention were concentrated on other concerns: surviving, escaping, trying to stay alive, getting food, staying safe.
Benveniste’s situation was extreme, but this story enables me to talk about a problem with which many researchers (and other people too), are faced when they live in a precarious work situation. I try to understand the condition of those living in precarious conditions, using the concept of scarcity. Scarcity is a field of study created by Sendhil Mullainathanand Eldar Shafir. They published a number of papers and a successful book in 2013, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Scarcityis when one person feels that he has less than he feels he needs; it could be time, money, social scarcity; and it could involve social and economic security, a good and stable work position, loved ones, relationships. In fact, «Scarcity is not just a physical constraint. It is also a mindset. When scarcity captures our attention, it changes how we think – whether it is at the level of milliseconds, hours, or days or weeks. By occupying an important place in our thoughts, it affects what we notice, how we weigh our choices, how we deliberate, and ultimately what we decide and how we behave. When we function under scarcity, we represent, manage, and deal with problems differently.» (12)Scarcity operates unconsciously, capturing the mind, it is a mindset which imposes itself on us, leading to continuous dissatisfaction. The authors show that in a situation of scarcity, people tend to be less intelligent than in a normal context. If they have to choose something, and they are in a situation of scarcity, then some people tend to take the wrong decision. One example in the book concerns a community of farmers. The farmers are paid for their work once a year. The researchers measured the competences and the intelligence of the farmers, using a variety of psychological cognitive tests, when they had money, and when money started to run out just before the harvest. The results were that when the farmers received their salary, they were more intellectually capable than when they were short of money and resources. The scarcity thus imposed itself on the farmers’ community.
Another experiment concerned starvation. People who suffer from starvation start to be obsessed with food. Even answering simple questions becomes difficult, it requires an extraordinary effort. All their attention is on food.
When scarcity prevails, there is no room for other matters. When people do not experience scarcity, they take care of their children’s education, their health (for example, they eat better, do exercise, do not forget to take their medicines), they think about their future and it seems that they are more positive about life. But when themoney begins to runout, the usual solutions to everyday problems become very difficult: people are less engaged in thinking about their life, they do not take care of their health, of their children and their education.
Scarcity appears in our daily routine too. Imagine that you have a pressing deadline for an important project. You work hard all day, because your future depends on this project. So, you focus on this project all the time. In the meantime, your boyfriend asks you to go to the supermarket to buy some groceries for dinner. You go to the supermarket, but all your attention is captured by your project and the deadline. So, you buy the butter, the bread, the orange juice, the yogurt, the milk: everything necessary for breakfast, but you forget all the things that he asked you to buy for dinner. The problem is that your mind is totally preoccupied by the project. And that project, coupled with its deadline, occupies all your mental capacity (the authors uses bandwidth). And you forget the food, the birthday, the anniversary and so on: «We can directly measure mental capacity or, as we call it, bandwidth. We can measure fluid intelligence, a key resource that affects how we process information and make decision. We can measure executive control, a key resource that affects how impulsively we behave. And we find that scarcity reduces all these components of bandwidth – it makes us less insightful, less forward thinking, less controlled. And the effects are large. Being poor, for example, reduces a person’s cognitive capacity more than going one full night without sleep. It is not that the poor have less bandwidth as individuals. Rather, it is that the experience of poverty reduces anyone’s bandwidth.» (13)
In all these cases there is a loss of attention, creativity, intelligence, because bandwidth is made of cognitive capacity («the psychological mechanism that underlies our ability to solve problems, retain information, engage in logical reasoning, and so on») and executive control («our ability to manage our cognitive activities, including planning, attention, initiating and inhibiting actions, and controlling impulses»). There is a loss of competencies. The authors’ study «revealed that simply raising monetary concerns for the poor erodes cognitive performance even more than being seriously sleep-deprived.» Because «The poor are not just short on cash. They are also short on bandwidth. (…) The same person when experiencing poverty – or primed to think about his monetary troubles – did significantly worse on several tests. He showed less flexible intelligence. He showed less executive control. With scarcity on his mind, he simply had less mind for everything else.» (157)
I’d like you to think about researchers living in a situation of scarcity. Many times, I asked myself: why, when I have a meeting with my colleagues, do we talk so much about money, work, having a permanent position? And why, for example after the usual ritualistic presentations during some congress, is scientific research not the principal subject of our discussion? The point is that the precarious condition in which academics are maintained is extremely widespread, and researchers live in such challenging economic and social conditions that it monopolizes their mental bandwidth and affects their cognitive capacity (just like in the case of starvation, when people can only think about food).
If the researchers are concentrated on their problems of survival, who is taking care of their research? If their attention, creativity, intelligence is eroded by scarcity, just like the community of farmers, we have to ask how many competencies, how many ideas, how many discoveries we are losing because people in academia have to struggle every day with scarcity. Moreover, if the lack of social security, money, future, occupies the minds of academics, it means that their publications and their research tend to be guided by this necessity and not only by the priorities of the research itself. I do not know how many times I have had to listen to some colleague telling me that in order to receive a new contract they need to publish more or publish a book or publish something as soon as possible. They are not focused on solving a scientific problem or on triggering a discussion in the scientific community, but they are rather obsessed with their need of securing a new contract.
Many others tell me about their strategy to obtain a permanent position. In this case too, they do not speak about a new scientific strategy that could lead to new discoveries or theories or ideas; rather, they are focused on a political strategy that could win them a permanent position. Only after this will they think about research for its own sake. It is clear that the pressure to publish more, either to keep a job or to be offered a new one, is yet another factor that increases the scarcity of time in university research. And the lack of time, just like money, is a part of the problem of scarcity and a major issue affecting the health of university workers.
Scarcity affects academic research, producing a loss of competencies that is detrimental toeffectiveresearcher: creativity, attention, rationality, reading, long-term vision, and ultimately, intelligence. Over a long period, just like others who live in conditions of constant precariousness, it is easy to imagine that scarcity erodes competencies – built over many years of work during a PhD and on post-doctorate research projects that are mostly paid by society – to a point of collapse. All research findings, all new theories, are a fundamental heritageof society, because academic research is not disconnected from the collective or from a culture of productivity. So, at the same time scarcity affects the personal situation of researchers, their families, and their community. It is not so hazardous to link scarcity – and precarity – with many health problems of workers in university institutions.
Okay, but what is the solution? We probably need to immediately reduce scarcity in universities. Reducing scarcity means reducing economic instability, social indeterminism, erratic careers, precariousness. We have to stop encouraging short-term contracts, replacing them with more permanent positions: «A greater focus on the creation of dependable jobs and stable incomes for the poor across the world could be psychologically transformative.» (178) We have to stop promoting the culture of publish or perishand we have to nurture culture of more in-depth reading and reflective research. We have to stem the culture of production at all costs, redirecting our energy to quality built on scientific, not capitalist, criteria. We have to give researchers the time to work, the time to live, the time to discover, the time to think, the chanceto develop all their competencies for our society.
Benveniste lost all his notes on the book (Noms d’agent et noms d’action en indo-européen, 1948) that he was writing just before the war. It took some time for him to rewrite the entire book, which was published a few years later. Once he was safe in Fribourg he wrote to his colleagues in Geneva, telling them that after many years spent struggling with the difficulties of war and persecution, he had rediscovered the joyof untroubled academic study. If war wasn’t finished yet, he could finally devote himself once again to research with a liberated spirit.
Alessandro Chidichimo, Programme Indépendant de Recherche
(The author would like to thank Julie Billaudand Martin de Sa’ Pinto)
Bibliography
Benveniste, E. 1948. Noms d’agent et noms d’action en indo-européen, Paris, Adrien-Maisonneuve.
Chidichimo, A. 2019 (in press). « Émile Benveniste à la guerre 1939-1945 » in Bisconti, V. et Mathieu, C., Entre vie et théorie. La biographie des linguists dans l’histoire des sciences du langage, Lambert-Lucas, Limoges.
Mullainathan, S. and Shafir, E. 2013. Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much. Scarcity, London, Allen Lane.
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