Thoughts on Quizbowl Employment

[Cheynem]

As I've been working this semester on quasi full time quizbowl employment, I've had a few thoughts. Here's one of them.

Quizbowl writing tends to emphasize a freelance or "Uber"-esque economy. This makes sense, I suppose, but let me explain. While there are "full" employees of various companies, most writers for companies like NAQT, NHBB, and HSAPQ are basically freelancers, or are being paid per question. As effectively the head of HSAPQ, a lot of my payments come from the number of questions I have produced. This creates a very casual, Uber-esque economy--just like most Uber drivers aren't professional cab drivers but people seeking to make some extra cash, most quizbowl writers are college students, teachers, lawyers, etc. who kick in some questions and make cash. In many ways, this is good--you don't have to make quizbowl your life to participate. I think the college game is always going to be like this, too, because of the relative "smallness" of participants.

However, this can lead to some issues. I think most quizbowl company leaders have been frustrated at times as writers simply fail to produce questions (or wait until the last minute). This is because in terms of their payment and employment structure, it does not matter when they produce the questions--it arguably doesn't even matter if they don't produce questions. A person who could write 5 questions today for $25 (sent months later) may not find that a very good use of time, particularly compared with school or actual employment. In the "real world," a person, even a freelancer, who didn't pull his or her own weight would be fired or quietly dumped. Companies can get away with that because there are hundreds of other prospective employees out there. There aren't hundreds of other quizbowl writers. And so, people who are very late or unreliable question producers continually get asked on for more projects. Perversely, they end up getting paid just as much in many cases as more reliable writers.

This is not meant to be a shame, shame post. Quizbowl does a lot of guilt-tripping already. Rather, it's an admission of fact--I do not blame the people who value their school or work more than quizbowl writing. What I instead would like to consider is perhaps thinking about a better (or different) way. I've contemplated trying this next year for HSAPQ--instead of paying people per question or emphasizing the freelance model, why not emphasize a (sort of) salaried model? In other words, instead of telling a crew of 30+ writers, have at this set, $5 per question, go and finish (with all of the positives and negatives listed above), why not say to 4 or 5 people, I am paying you this flat sum to produce "all the science" or "all the history" for this tournament. The sum would be reasonably generous--the idea would be is that it would be a high enough pay to be someone's "full time" (or at least quasi full-time) job for that semester or period of time, providing an incentive for that person to work. In short, I am suggesting that quizbowl, which really requires a lot of labor, endeavor to pay people enough to incentivize them to put in that labor.

There are obvious potential problems. If your small team flakes out, you're back to square one (I assume contracts would have very strict wordings about the sum being revoked for failure to produce). How can companies pay these wages without really increasing the prices of their products? Could people, even in a generous quizbowl economy, actually live on a quizbowl salary? I don't know the answers to these questions, but I think we should talk about them more--high school quizbowl is a game that is expanding more and more. I see no reason why it could not support well-paying (or at least decently well-paying) jobs.

[Dominator]

Some of the questions you bring up about incentives are interesting. If we've learned anything from Freakonomics, it's that people will do what they they are incentivized to do (that, and that abortions lower crime rates). I think Brad's model of cultural editors for NHBB attempts to do as you suggested, but on a much smaller scale. If it works, perhaps it would help to try to scale up.

I have long been of the opinion that quizbowl undervalues itself monetarily. Compared to similar activities in which high schoolers compete, quizbowl is laughably cheap. Some will always argue that we are just on the verge of pricing teams out and that any increase will lead to lower participation, but regardless of whether that is true, it is not a compelling argument if it creates the world Mike describes - one in which we cannot sustain quality events because the people creating and running tournaments find it no longer worth their time to do so.

I think quizbowl should absolutely strive to support more full-time producers with a legitimate salary. The question becomes how many of those people we need, how legitimate that salary is, and therefore what the effect is on the consumers' bottom lines.

[Cheynem]

There are some other points to consider, I guess.

Is quizbowl employment sustainable on a feasible level? For instance, I had no trouble writing the VHSL history this year. Could I do that again, next year, knowing that I would have to write on many of the same topics and answerlines? Is that different than teaching, say, the Civil War year after year in an introductory history course?

One of the reasons I am serious about this is because that while I am in something of an employment flux, I do think that a person with my skills (being able to write good, timely questions) that are in much demand in high school quizbowl should not be able to at least make as much yearly income as I was as a entry-level college instructor at a small university. In other words, it would probably be in my better financial interest (right now) to go work at a drugstore or become a high school teacher instead of working full-time for quizbowl, which I think is an unfortunate loss for quizbowl, and something, as Noah alludes to, that could theoretically be fixed.

[Stained Diviner]

I agree that we would be better off if there were more full-time writers.

It might be interesting to put this in more concrete terms. Are we saying that somebody who writes 3000 questions that get used in a year should make $50K? I realize that the dollar amount that would convince somebody to do this full time varies a lot from individual to individual, but I wonder if we have a chance of making this a reality. It's possible that doubling current pay rates wouldn't do much.

[Cheynem]

50K would be almost double my old teaching salary. On the other hand, 3,000 questions in a year would be pretty hard to do (maybe? I haven't crunched the numbers).

[wcheng]

50K would be almost double my old teaching salary. On the other hand, 3,000 questions in a year would be pretty hard to do (maybe? I haven't crunched the numbers).

3000 questions/year seems difficult, but within the realm of possibility. If you're willing to write on each weekday of the year, you would have to write about 11.54 questions per day (3000 questions / 260 weekdays). On the other hand, if you're willing to write on every day of the year, you would have to write about 8.22 questions per day (3000 questions / 365 days). If you're writing questions as a full-time job, this seems like an achievable task, but I can't imagine that there are that many people who could or would be willing to do this every day.

[Skepticism and Animal Feed]

Why don't we discuss models of how something like this might work? Here is a simple one:

Suppose I am an investor in quizbowl activities and I am looking for a 10% annual return on my quizbowl investments. However, I haven't played quizbowl in years, don't know what makes a good question by modern standards, don't know any staff or possible venues, etc.

So I contact Mike Cheyne and say "I will give you $30,000 for the 2017 - 2018 competition year, and you can use that money to fund quizbowl tournaments. I will get all the money from these quizbowl tournaments, and I expect to receive at least $33,000."

Mike Cheyne then goes and either writes a bunch of questions, subcontracts other people to write the questions with a slice of that $30,000, or a mix. He goes and arranges for the tournament to be mirrored at various sites throughout the country. He goes and arranges for the tournament to be promoted on HSQB. He collects payment from the teams that will be attending.

To raise the $33,000 I want, assuming the fee is $120 per team, this tournament needs to be played by 275 teams. (I mean not really - that's assuming all staff are free volunteers and no hosts want a cut of the money. That won't be the case, staffers can be expensive). If Mike hikes the fee to $300, it merely needs to be played by 110 teams. There are college tournaments that end up being played by that many teams, but who knows how many of them have $300 laying around.

Or maybe Mike Cheyne does this math, and notices that I didn't tell him to run a single tournament, I told him to make $33,000. Perhaps he sees that all he needs to do is collect a certain number of entry fees: and maybe that means multiple tournaments. Perhaps $30,000 is enough to incentivize Mike to cause to exist multiple tournaments over the course of the year. (This post would have been better written in Akkadian, or some other language with causatives, but only a few of you speak that, so bear with me on that awkward structure I just used).

(Of course just paying Mike Cheyne and setting him off into the wild creates all sorts of well-known, well-documented principle-agent issues, which I am also ignoring for simplicity sake)

Anyway, if there's a point to any of this, it's probably that there are very few organizations in quizbowl that operate on large enough of a scale to pay somebody a decent annual salary for quizbowl activities.

[cchiego]

I think Noah's right that quizbowl is being "undervalued" in some ways because most of us would rather, say volunteer for free to help make a tournament happen rather than demand higher wages. Perhaps we could get more people over time with payment, but then you get into the problem of many schools having a hard time getting enough $$ to play. This is to some degree why I'm intrigued at the Texas Quizbowl model of higher prices, but also a strong, central organization that seems to send a lot of staffers out to make sure tournaments get run and runs a corresponding set of camps.

One thing that might puzzle economists/consultants looking at the economy is quizbowl is how outreach--literally adding new customers to quizbowl--is still basically uncompensated. Writing questions is absolutely necessary to quizbowl, but once a question is used its value is gone. Getting a new school to start a quizbowl team and keep running it on the other hand generates income every year, potentially in perpetuity. Yet there is currently next to no financial incentive for many people in quizbowl to do this (someone should calculate how much the average/median team each year spends on quizbowl and how long they stick around on average). Isolated TDs around the country do occasionally do outreach because it helps their own bottom line, but often once you hit a certain field cap there isn't much incentive. This is a great illustration of the collective action problem in action. NHBB I think had/has some financial incentives for TDs to try to bring in new teams, but I'm not sure how well that worked in practice (I would be curious to hear).

For now though, I think the great untapped source of $$ is going local. I've seen at the local county/league level people making anywhere from $80 to 325 a match. They'll also pay "commissioners" a decent stipend to run leagues. If you meet with enough people and present a coherent vision for running a competent league on good questions, that might translate into a long-running relationship (I'd be curious to hear from Greg Bossick, who's actually set up a number of leagues in Ohio, on this point). The problem is that local districts/boards often seem to want someone "local" like a local celebrity of some kind or a friend of someone on the school board to run things. Plus you then have to go through the morass of bureaucracy that seems endemic to every school district. And while line-item budgets can be lucrative, they can also be cut pretty quickly if you don't have a strong lobbying group. The skills that make someone a good question writer might also not always translate to good TDing, organizing, and hobnobbing skills.

I'm also somewhat surprised at the lack of grants from various foundations in quizbowl. I was looking through this area recently and there are tons of funding opportunities for non-profit organizations aimed at education, many with $$ specifically earmarked for salaries. The issue, of course, is that these are all locally focused and want a non-profit with a track record (plus you'd probably need some grant-writing experience to formulate a good grant application). Again, more of a local focus here might be a way to start tapping these sources.

[Habitat_Against_Humanity]

50K would be almost double my old teaching salary. On the other hand, 3,000 questions in a year would be pretty hard to do (maybe? I haven't crunched the numbers).

3000 questions/year seems difficult, but within the realm of possibility. If you're willing to write on each weekday of the year, you would have to write about 11.54 questions per day (3000 questions / 260 weekdays). On the other hand, if you're willing to write on every day of the year, you would have to write about 8.22 questions per day (3000 questions / 365 days). If you're writing questions as a full-time job, this seems like an achievable task, but I can't imagine that there are that many people who could or would be willing to do this every day.

One thing I think we might be overlooking when proposing a small cadre of writers is the attrition and wear on a writer's ability to produce interesting content. I know 8 questions a day 5 days a week would wear the heck out of me and eventually cause me to write a ton of crappy questions. I think I can list the only people I'd trust to produce 8 usable questions a day for a year on one finger-amputated hand. Isn't one of the perks of having writing duties spread far and wide that you as editor have license to get rid of the lousy questions inevitably produced? I think more writers translates productively into different framings and ideas for how to ask/construct questions and "fresher" results.

[Cheynem]

I think that the "small writer" proposal would, if possible, try and cycle through different writers or put them on different topics (in the same way that professors aren't always teaching the same courses). Furthermore, doing something like a quizbowl writer's retreat in which people get together to plan out large amounts of answerlines together (wouldn't this be great--you'd take a weekend, bang out a bunch of answerlines, and then do something fun in the evenings) might also ensure questions remain fresh.