How is a tenured professor like a drug lord? How is a new Ph.D. researcher like a street-level drug dealer?

These are not riddles intended to amuse. Rather, they present the gist of an essay by Alexandre Afonso, who teaches political economy at King’s College London where he holds the rank of lecturer. Taking off from a chapter entitled “Why Do Drug Dealers Still Live with Their Moms?” in the bestselling-book Freakonomics, by economist Steven D. Levitt and writer Stephen J. Dubner, Afonso argues that academic departments have a lot in common with drug cartels: A few highly paid, permanent top dogs enjoy power and comfort while farming out the dirty work to large numbers of low-paid, mostly temporary underlings.

The question that Levitt and Dubner answer is why street dealers and mules—or, in Afonso’s retelling, grad students and postdocs—accept miserable pay and working conditions when they could be earning more in less annoying and dangerous, more secure endeavors.