Quality kills the mediastar? Career paths of intellectuals

Recent economic crises show that forecasts made by “experts” are frequently off the mark, fueling discussion about a potential decline in intellectuals’ reliability to offer opinions of value. While intellectuals were originally assumed to be trusted with sound analyses of developments in society, nowadays intellectuals (or those pretending to be) are often blamed for primarily striving for prominence, giving birth to the role model of the “public intellectual”. We adopt an economic perspective and take a market-oriented view on intellectual output. Our data suggests that the market for public intellectuals brings forth few omnipresent “media stars” that are able to largely cover the market demand for “expert knowledge”. On such markets with “winner-takes-all” characteristics, the best performers can command substantially higher (non)monetary incomes. Our research question is: What separates the media stars from the long-tail of media midgets? Thereby, we focus on an economic issue of general interest: Does it pay off to further engage in knowledge specialization, or is it better to capitalize on your current skillset and engage in increasing market presence? We focus on news media and TV presence of Germany’s most influential intellectuals and identify factors that create versus destroy the chances for “intellectual stardom”, applying both a static and a longitudinal perspective. Based on our results, we cautiously draw some conclusions concerning developments of the quality of public intellectual output offered.