Jane Galt reponds to a post from Steven Teles on the effect of affirmative action on the academic market with an interesting observation:

[T]he academic job market, as described here, is very close to what most academics think labour markets are like outside the [academy]: a sharply binary process in which there are clearly delineated winners or losers, the outcomes are somewhat arbitrary, and a very slight run of bad luck can land you in a place from which there is literally no hope of escaping. This might go a long way towards explaining academic leftism, in two ways: first, going through the academic job market might make you more left-wing; and second of all, people who think that the entire world works this way might be more predisposed to pursue jobs in academia.

An aside: does anyone have a citation for the Rick Hess article in PS that Teles mentions? A search of JSTOR and the Cambridge Journals site has drawn a complete blank.