Hacker News Reader

Comment by Hoasi | Hacker News Reader

> But the answer to the question "Why are smart young people going into low risk high reward occupations over high risk low reward occupations?" is pretty obvious.

Indeed, but it also highlights something that may be less obvious, and that is the proper allocation of reward. The deeper question is: why do we systematically undervalue the very fields that contribute the most to society? Careers in education, healthcare, research, and less stable creative ventures should not need subsidies if we acknowledged their inerrant long term value.

View on HN

"The deeper question is: why do we systematically undervalue the very fields that contribute the most to society?"

The answer for most of them is simple: oversupply. Being a teacher is generally something a lot of people want to be, and especially for K-12, almost by definition, the intellectual bar is "finished K-12 reasonably well". (If you read curricula for teaching schools, you'll find that while teachers are generally educated maybe a year or two's worth past the high school level in their chosen teaching subjects, that's generally it for the requirements.) Accomplishing the "bullet point" objectives of being a teacher is not a difficult enough bar to filter out enough people.

(I phrase it that way to forstall hiking the goalpost to the sort of astonishing, life changing teacher whose slightest jiggling of their eyebrows inspire students to new heights of knowledge and curiousity. Those may not be all that common, but that's not the bar in question. Most teachers are pretty close to average.)

When you imagine yourself in the role of teacher (the inspiring kind, I'm sure) or researcher (who is, of course, hot on the trail of the cure of cancer, not researching some workaday research question), it's easy to imagine how you should be paid more. But if you put yourself in the position of paying for these things with your money, and you offer $100,000/yr to be an elementary school teacher in some medium-sized town in the country because wouldn't that just be awesome, and you get your first 10,000 applications today with another 10,000 coming tomorrow, it's not long before you start thinking "Hmmm.... maybe I don't have to part with quite $100,000/yr to fill this position.... maybe $90,000 isn't such a bad idea, and I can use that $10,000 to do some other $WORTHY_THING..." (Or... maybe I could use this money to hire two teachers....)

It's easy to imagine how someone else should pay teachers three or four times more... it would be a lot more challenging if you were the one doing it.

Setting the bar low is undervaluing teaching.

it's not clear to me that the current set of teachers aren't good enough. in my state, the qualifications and pay for a private school teacher are actually lower.

I suspect marginal increases in teacher quality just don't matter that much when you make them teach classes of 30+ students. it seems to me that allocating funds to hire more teachers at the same pay would be more effective than just paying more for the same job.

That's another thing that may feel good to say, but trying to manifest it in practice is really difficult. What more can you ask for from, say, a middle-school algebra teacher other than that 1. they know the material well enough to teach it 2. they are capable of maintaining basic classroom discipline and 3. they are conscientious enough to grade papers and run the mechanics of a classroom and 4. don't have some sort of other spoiler disqualifier here like being abusive or pathologically impatient or something?

Maybe a better way of phrasing it wouldn't be to say that the job of teacher is "easy" per se, but that it's something built into our genes. Teaching is a thing humans do, like talking or throwing, as a subset of our general human bonding skills. Being a decent teacher is obviously a bit more exclusive than "able to talk", but it's just not that exclusive in our species, it's a widely shared skill that has been selected on for many tens or hundreds of thousands of years. It's hard to imagine a stable economic situation where it isn't something we have an oversupply of.

It may be something we just ‘do’ but there is enormous variation in method and skill and use of materials and technologies. And we can today do things we couldn’t do even 20 years ago.

In this way it’s comparable to cooking, which is also something we just ‘do’.

The bar can be set as high as we want.

That sounds more like there is an under supply of high quality teachers and schools are desperate enough to take anyone.

Job that are suposed to be done "out of passion" of "for a cause" are always underpaid and offer terrible conditions.