The Precariat
Eric Weinstein describes The Precariat as the class of scientists and thinkers trapped in economic fragility. Once architects of prosperity, they now live at the mercy of grants, bureaucracies, and Peer Injunction. Their work, a public good, creates wealth that never reaches them. Precarity silences dissent and breeds conformity; courage is unaffordable. Weinstein argues that restoring security and prosperity to scientists would reignite innovation, rebuild national strength, and renew civilizationâs creative core. Wealth, he insists, is the antidote to corruption, fear, and decay in science.
The Vanishing Contract
Eric Weinstein describes a class of scientists and thinkers who no longer possess the security and Academic Freedom once associated with intellectual life. They built the modern world but now live through unstable funding, short-term appointments, and dependence on institutional approval. He refers to them The Precariat â people whose professional value is clear yet whose economic position is fragile.
Weinstein points out that the postwar understanding between society and its scientists has disappeared. Stability and prestige have been replaced by grant cycles and bureaucratic oversight. What had been a revered calling has become a desperate contest for survival, an Academic Hunger Games.
A Market Failure in Plain Sight
Weinstein argues that scientific labor is structurally undervalued. Researchers produce public goods â discoveries that benefit everyone and cannot be restricted â but receive compensation inconsistent with their societal value. He calls this a "market failure," since the system rewards administration and ownership more than creation.
He wrote in 2023 that scientists generate wealth that flows away from them:
You see scientists create what economists call a MARKET FAILURE in the form of a PUBLIC GOOD. That is the VALUE our scientists create isnât captured in the PRICE they can command even in a free market. Then we broke our contract to take care of them by sharing downstream wealth.
This condition, he maintains, distorts priorities. It leads to a society that treats knowledge as an afterthought while consuming its results.
The Price of Fear
Financial dependence changes how people speak and act. When scientists' jobs and grants are insecure, dissent becomes dangerous. Many remain silent to avoid jeopardizing their positions.
Scientists made us wealthy.
It is time to return the favor.
Stop producing precarious scientists.
A scientist needs to know she/he is not hanging by a thread. You need to be able to tell The Fauci/Collins/Daszaks of this world to Eff off. And survive. And Thrive.
We are paying for cheap science. Itâs in your lungs now. Letâs start paying for real science. Itâs much cheaper.
Weinstein cites the pandemic years as evidence, reminding his audience that scientists repeated the views of administrative leaders such as Fauci and Collins instead of challenging them. The issue is structural: a precarious academic profession cannot remain intellectually open. There is no possibility of dissent without fear of losing everything.
Cheap Science, Costly Consequences
Weinstein contends that modern research culture favors compliance and volume over originality. Budgets are cut, expectations rise, and institutions reward caution. He describes this as "cheap science" â a system that appears efficient yet yields diminished outcomes.
I spent a lot of time in beautiful homes and second homes of older research scientists as a grad student.
We should be embarrassed how far into precariousness we pushed Generation X & Millennials. Our entire economy is now bet on bargain science provided way below market.#Enough
The consequence is declining trust and stagnation. Bureaucracy replaces discovery, and administrative logic overtakes radical curiosity and risk taking.
The Expert Class in Decline
By 2025, Weinstein had broadened his focus from scientists to the larger "expert class." Journalists, academics, and professionals face the same conditions of dependence and instability.
He wrote:
âYou arenât having an expertise crisis. Youâre having an artificial precariousness crisis imposed on your expert class by broken tacit agreements turning the community into expert witnesses who no longer can afford to put that expertise in public service.â -Eric Weinstein on X
Weinstein characterizes this as a structural process that turns independent expertise into managed opinion. When professional survival depends on sponsorship or compliance, the publicâs access to independent judgment erodes.
Restoring the Builders
Weinstein maintains that stability is essential for intellectual honesty. A scientist must be able to resist authority and still remain employed. Without that foundation, even the strongest institutions risk devolving into performance structures.
Eric refers to mid-20th-century science as an example of a time when careers were durable and inquiry was protected. Restoring the appropriate framework would include dramatically increasing Academic Freedom and compensation, removing the Extractive Elite from positions of power to replace them with the True Elite, and returning to an older model of "Peer Review", where fiercely independent editors run journals.
Editors who are distinguished fiercely independent researchers themselves, with huevos of steel, integrity, a cuture of collegiality, autonomy, money, and a variety of strong differing opinions.
The Stakes
Weinstein presents The Precariat as evidence of a deep imbalance between creators and institutions. A society that cannot secure its knowledge producers risks losing its ability to generate new ideas.
He calls for the renewal of the social contract with the scientific and expert classes â one that links stability, freedom, and responsibility. Without that foundation, the engines of discovery falter, and those capable of truth are compelled to choose survival over candor.
Quotes
We need to unleash American scientists, get them secure, happy, well-fed. Rich. If you make your scientists, relatively wealthy and prosperousâthey don't have to be ridiculously wealthy and prosperous, but right now, they're precarious. They're part of The Precariat. If we did that, I think what we could do is we could usher in a renaissance that would filter down to technology startups and the whole tech ecosystem.
It would give us better national defense and would also, you know, I'll just focus on what Elon is also focused on. Becoming an interstellar species is the dream that we should be harboring. And the fact that that sounds like a fairy tale and that that sounds like a will-o-the-wisp is very dangerous.
That's the next level. That's where we're supposed to be. And it's time to clear String Theory out of the way and get back to doing the physics that rocks the world.
- Eric Weinstein, 16 Dec 2024, on Piers Morgan Uncensored
On X
2022
I spent a lot of time in beautiful homes and second homes of older research scientists as a grad student.
We should be embarrassed how far into precariousness we pushed Generation X & Millennials. Our entire economy is now bet on bargain science provided way below market.#Enough
There are only so many times I can say it: youâve asked science to make others wealthy, secure & free as you subjected scientists to a life of precariousness, peer review, groupthink, virtue signaling & bureaucracy.
The madness ends when you stop whining about PhDs w/ 2nd homes.
2023
Because you stopped them from participating in the prosperity they created for everyone else downstream of science.
To put it bluntly they are echoing the words of those whose hands now encircle their throats. Thatâs why you got sick with Covid. Why you arenât getting the truth.
You see scientists create what economists call a MARKET FAILURE in the form of a PUBLIC GOOD. That is the VALUE our scientists create isnât captured in the PRICE they can command even in a free market. Then we broke our contract to take care of them by sharing downstream wealth.
If they were wealthy, as they would be in any sane society, they would tell you what they thought of Fauci and Collins and Daszak. But they are *precarious*. So they parroted those people instead.
Hence their new cranky positions on reproductive mutilation. WIV. Vaccines. Etc.
Think of it this way. We told the worldâs smartest people they were privileged welfare queens in lab coats & made them waste their time begging for grants, stabbing each other in the back. So they adapted. We can have reliable science back as soon as we open our eyes to this. đ
Scientists made us wealthy.
It is time to return the favor.
Stop producing precarious scientists.
A scientist needs to know she/he is not hanging by a thread. You need to be able to tell The Fauci/Collins/Daszaks of this world to Eff off. And survive. And Thrive.
We are paying for cheap science. Itâs in your lungs now. Letâs start paying for real science. Itâs much cheaper.
2025
Many of you are asking me to comment on this video.
I was trying very hard not to do so.
@skdh has not been treated properly by the physics community in my opinion. We are generally in agreement and I recommend her.
She is now bigger by herself than all of @bgreeneâs World Science Festival. And I believe that she has to think through these comments at her new scale.
Bottom Line: @skdh is far more in the right than her critics will acknowledge. But she is now at a new scale and these remarks are misleading in my opinion.
Fundamental Physics is, to me, what Mars and Rockets are to @elonmusk: manâs only hope for long term survival.
My belief is that @skdh is now so negative based on her egregious treatment at the hands of her community that her righteous position is actually endangering physics itself in the era of @DOGE.
I would consider debating her as a friend to give a more positive view.
Her and my tormentors in physics are our enemies basically because they are precarious. And precarious scientists are dangerous. Should we starve them or pay them?
@skdh and I agree that there are a lot of shitty physics folks behaving badly. Sabine is closer to saying cut off the bad scientists. I am closer to saying âWe have a Fauci problem in physics. Get rid of the means by which our âFaucisâ control us by making their colleagues precarious. Wealth is the solution to the ethics crisis in physics. The physics community that brought you the wealth of the modern world cannot be controlled by our Fauciâs. Honor the community by freeing them from economic tyranny and the problem gets solved in a positive manner.â
I despise the cowardly enemies of science, and of Sabine. In my opinion they are bullies and cowards really only because they were wrongly made precarious.
We desperately need our physicists. Free them. Pay them. Free them from our Fauciâs.
I would be happy to debate Sabine (and @bgreene, @seanmcarroll, @michiokaku and others) on this. Itâs literally life and death to me in the long term [See my pinned tweet.] and Sabine is wildly too negative here. Happy to defend this.
đ
I want to read you an email that I was asked to keep confidential because I think it explains some of my worries about academia.
How about reaffirming the unsayable:
A) Research Universities are supposed to be dedicated to scholarship and discovery above all else. Not teaching. Not politics. Not incubating business spinoffs.
B) They are suppose to be exclusive. Not inclusive.
C) The professors are supposed to lead the university. Not the staff. Not the administrators.
D) Academics are not to be made precarious.
E) Even private elite universities are not really private. They are government funded to do the work that the market cannot.
F) The USG is in breach of the historical commitment to support blue sky science in US Universities.
G) Graduate students are workers disguised as students. Foreign students are a foreign workforce.
H) Peer review is astonishingly recent and doesnât work.
I) There is a quasi military function to research universities. They are part of National Security. Patriotism matters.
J) Some fields do not deserve to be together on a level field. Biology and gender studies for example.
K) Some fields *may* now be too dangerous to be studied openly. Parts of physics, number theory and Machine learning leap to mind. This must be studied.
L) The AAU, NSF, NAS etc. have all conspired against the welfare of American scientists and their families. Scientists need to be in the rooms where their fates are determined.
M) The difference between a research university and a college takes place almost exclusively within three groups of people: Professors, Graduate Students, and PostDocs/Researchers/Visitors. It often takes place in the afternoons. In seminars. In Labs. Etc. If you arenât part of that world you arenât part of the University. You are working or studying in BigEd but not involved with the university itself.
N) The great man/woman theory is basically correct in academics. Individual academicians change the world.
O) The Mansfield amendment, Dole-Bayh, Eilberg, IMMACT90 etc laws need to be undone. The damage has been incalculable.
What has happened is that the expert class has been made precariousâŠby the power class.
The power class then buys or threatens the expert class.
âJoin us Sarah in saying that a man identifying as a woman is as much a woman as a womanâŠas a professor of biology, or lose your job.â
âIt would really be helpful Sunil to have a study that shows that our product is helpful and not harmful or at least that the any harms are negligibly small and are being greatly exaggerated.â
âSurely you are still a scientist Fred and havenât become a racist conspiracy theorist claiming this virus could possibly have come out of a laboratory biowepons program.â
âBut Gustavo, why would you suggest we waste what little discretionary funding we have on a conference where non-string theorists jealous of our funding success point to our lack of any definitive progress when we clearly have so many interesting leads to follow?â
BOTTOM LINE: you arenât having an expertise crisis. Your having an artificial precariousness crisis imposed on your expert class by broken tacit agreements turning the community into expert witnesses who no longer can afford to put that expertise in public service.
If you actually believe that expertise has collapsed, then explain why the power class are right now buying, converting, and privatizing your experts, while all the while whispering in your ear that the public spirited experts still loyal to their craft are charlatans, madmen, âbig madâ, grifters, pseudo scientists and anything else they think you might be dumb enough to believe?
Have you never heard of concierge medicine? Who flies and maintains the planes at the private airports? Who does the plastic surgery? What do former Delta force operators do for work when they need to make money? Who provides IT security in $50M mansions? Who builds those homes?
Donât be an idiot. The more you are taught to hate and distrust your experts, the more they will turn to power to provide their expertise privately and bullshit to you publicly.
Sorry. But that is exactly what is happening.
Good luck. đ
Here is a challenge for any of my colleagues who think this is a nothingburger: given the craziness of the widely discussed and publicized claims in a field that has not seen a change in the Fundamental models of physics in 50 years (!), who are the 25 most prominent physicists and mathematicians who have discussed the @pmarca claims publicly? Nobel laureates? Fields medalists? Chaired professors worried about the health of science? Top science communicators? PhD level debunkers demanding @pmarca to put up or shut up?
In a functional world where scientists are not precarious, it would be a *huge* topic of interest, discussion and academic freedom. Or it would be debunked. Thatâs it. There are no other options. Just those two.
Please leave your list below with links! đ
Ex MIT PostDoc here.
Q: Why do we make academic STEM research careers **TERRIBLE** for our own technical people?
Is there anyone at all who can explain this? 60yrs ago our people had swagger, academic freedom, ideas & 2nd homes on the Vineyard.
We now demand STEM serfs.
Why??
To be the best science and technical school in the world, you have to accept the smartest people in the world. Not all of them are born in the United States.
I devoted years of my life to the study of this question. Anyone who asks why we want our own STEM people to have AMAZING CAREERS in research like the 40s, 50s and 60s is accused of being a whiner. WTF? Itâs so regular you can set your clock to it.
Eff that. Someone is throwing this game. Why???? Why are we helping our rivals by destroying ourselves? Anyone?
I can never get an answer. Why do we expect US STEM people to sign up for shitty precarious careers? Why is it the job of PhDs to invent a glorious prosperous future for others they are not allowed to share?
We want to challenge and surpass our leaders like the old days, not peel them grapes, suck up to them and do their grunt work.
Itâs time to face facts: we are throwing the US science game for no known reason.
I have addressed the National Academy 5 times on this and at the highest levels. I cannot get a straight answer.
We are deliberately seeking less good conventional scientists from abroad over our own house brand of âFU take no prisoners yee haw cowboy scientists.â
I never want to hear the âBest and Brightestâ lie again in my life.
You just canât offer these shitty careers and say that with a straight face.
Letâs go back to going after the top U.S. minds again and make MIT great again.
Yes. No one else will tell you this truth.
Do you imagine I care about consensus positions or being misportrayed on this need to deal scientists into the prosperity that all comes from what THEY provided for others? Ha ha ha.
Iâm all in on this.
Here goes: you were all locked down for two years being fed lies about the origins, risks, and mortality of COViD and its vaccines because your scientists are all economically precarious. Every professor is vulnerable because they are precarious. Is this that difficult to understand for you??
Your tech elite wonât tell you.
MAGA wonât tell you.
The woke wonât tell you.
The NeoCons wonât tell you.
Peer Review wonât save you.
The professors wonât tell you.
For some reason that I donât grasp, there is exactly and only one person telling you this:
Your advanced society will collapse without scientific ground truth. And any scientist who says what I am saying is reputationally destroyed.
Taking the cowboy kings of American scientists and turning them into a servant class circa 1970 undermined the west. China will eventually overtake us as a result of this catastrophic decision. Science, freedom and truth were our edges because they became technology and tech became wealth and security and truth. The world appreciated and feared us.
And fixing this is as simple as dealing your top American scientists into personal security of about 8 figures of wealth. Enough to take a stand, hire lawyers/personal security, lose a job, have your reputation annihilated by âcovert influence campaignsâ from the intelligence services and insulate your family.
You want me to say it? Fauci and Collins and Baric and Daszak and Epstein and the CIA/DOE/NIH/NSF/NAS are no picnic. They are on the other side of this thing. They are terrifying. So yeah. I want our original deal back. Second homes is shorthand for âFuck you moneyâ or institutional protection. Clear? Can I possibly be clearer?
Let me repeat it: I want scientist secure enough to tell you the truth when our own U.S. government and military industrial complex goes totally rogue.
Cope with it.
But maybe you enjoy lockdowns. And having âdroneâ overflights we canât identify. And having our AI intellectual property instantly move to China. And injecting your children with things you canât understand. Maybe you want to tell your weapons grade virologists and physicists to fuck off and get a real job and stop whining. I wish you well.
If so, make fun of the one scientist who will tell you. Great move. Smart. Genius.
You need to deal in American scientists with Fuck You money. Because China is figuring this out right nowâŠ
Do have fun. Enjoy.
P.S. And why do you hear this from one voice? Because standing alone is what American Scientists do at their core when they believe they are right. It is what gave us our advantage. And I will chose that hill every single time. I believe in us over anyone else on earth. And if that means one voice, outgunned, against everyone else, so be it. Youâre wrong. And I know what I am talking about. You donât. Simple as that.
But maybe you want to check the consensus and get this tweet peer reviewed by my colleagues who cower in their STEM departments.
Best of luck.
So look at this poll.
I am here to tell you we the United States, are drowning in top scientific talent and we are making their lives into a precarious hell conning them into make everyone else rich. Except them.
âMake value for us to capture.â
Around 1970, Scientific research was transformed into a TERIBLE and PRECARIOUS U.S. career.
Made much worse in 1990.
Why is no one ringing this alarm? I have no clue.
Look at the poll results.
I repeat:
Scientific research was transformed into a TERIBLE and PRECARIOUS U.S. career.
Why is no one else ringing this alarm?
Iâm simply right on this. It does not matter what the consensus is. This is not a hill to die on. I will win every time.
I am telling you the truth. You are signed up for more pandemics, more drone incursion, more inflation, more Pharma recalls, and to lose to China.
Deal your scientists back in and away from the precariat. This is insane.
Look at this poll. There really is no question about this. Itâs a catastrophe.
U.S. National Interest Poll.
Which competitive occupation can America *least* afford to surrender as a highly attractive career path for Americans:
