COOKED
The core output — literature reviews, policy memos, survey instrument drafting, comparative country analyses, legislative and regulatory tracking — is text-in/text-out work that current models produce at usable draft quality, and much of the quantitative work is standard regression and coding of public datasets. No license gates the title, and clients rarely pay for the specific human. What survives is the senior advisory tier: someone who has cultivated sources, reads a political situation that isn't in the training data, and puts their name on a forecast a principal will act on.
Mixed — a routine tier and a judgment tier. An 8 reflects that coding open-ended survey responses, drafting country risk briefs, tracking bills through committee, and running cross-national regressions on Polity or V-Dem data are all now first-draftable by a model, while what stays human is elite interviewing, fieldwork in a country where the officials won't talk to a stranger, and designing a research question nobody has framed yet — enough of the job to keep it out of the 0-6 band but not enough to reach mixed-territory 12.
Fully desk- and screen-based. A 4 covers the occasional overseas fieldwork trip, focus group facilitation, or archival visit, but the modal week is Stata, Qualtrics, a literature database, and a Word document, and no part of the analysis requires the researcher's body to be anywhere in particular.
No licence, no signature requirement. A 1, not a 0, because nothing licenses the title — a PhD is a hiring credential, not a statutory gate — and when a forecast is wrong the institution absorbs it; the only faint personal exposure is IRB approval on human-subjects protocols and security clearance obligations for government contract work.
Some relationship component. A 9 sits mid-band because congressional staff, agency clients, and journalists do come back to a specific named analyst whose read on a region they've learned to trust, but the bulk of published output — think tank reports, journal articles, contracted country studies — is consumed for its findings and its institution's letterhead, not because the reader knows who wrote it.
Meaningful discretion. An 11 marks the gap between the methodologically constrained work — model specification, sampling frames, coding rules that peer review polices — and the genuinely unbounded calls like whether a coup is likely in the next six months or whether a sanctions regime will hold, where the analyst commits to a judgment that a principal acts on but where the decision itself, and its consequences, belong to someone else.
Law Teachers, Postsecondary EXPOSED
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