If your vote felt like it didn’t matter, it might be because it didn’t. There weren’t even two evils to choose from. I’m not saying, of course, that our avoidance of a variety of social, economic and environmental disasters wasn’t at stake. But with equal certainty, the fitness of our current political and economic model to deal with these problems was never really up for discussion – let alone the possibility that this way of doing things has in many cases created, aggravated or prolonged those very problems.

In a recent Slate essay, Rebecca Schumann, a visiting assistant professor of German at Ohio State University, demonstrates tidily the alleged lure of academic life: ‘Who wouldn’t want a job where you only have to work five hours a week, you get summers off, your whole job is reading and talking about books, and you can never be fired?’