TENURE TRADEOFFS. Would John Rawls have gotten tenure today? Kieran Healy suggests not: "Rawls published three papers in his first 10 years out of graduate school. In the current academic climate, he'd have been out on his ear after his sixth year, denied tenure and looking for a job in the toughest spot in the academic job market." That's a classic debate in the academy: what is the optimal production rate of quality? Given the proliferation of journals, and not much in the way of a market test for academic research, the incentives that exist are on the side of chunking out a lot of workmanlike stuff, never mind the profundity. The publication lags David Levine identifies certainly encourage erring on the side of workmanlike rather than profound publishing. Then, once one has tenure, the committee assignments will ensnare you if you're not careful (and if you are careful, the dumb decisions the committees make will get you anyway), and late bloomers like Rawls, or Kant, or Brahms simply vanish.