My wife is finishing up graduate school to start teaching in poor, urban schools. Chicago starting salaries are higher, I think around $55,000. I've seen the challenge she faces at her job and I can tell you -- this is not enough money.
I've seen the challenge she faces at her job and I can tell you -- this is not enough money.
This is a conversation about economics, incentives, and what people actually choose to do. It is not about feelings, platitudes, and how we believe that the world should work.
Any economist can tell you that if your wife and the school have entered into this arrangement of their own free will, then the amount that she is getting compensated is enough -- by definition.
The fact that she is willing to perform her job for this salary and other benefits shows definitely that she values her compensation more than she values what she could otherwise derive from any other opportunity open to her. If there were something else that increased her personal utility function more, than by definition, she would choose that alternative. The absence of such a choice demonstrates that this is the best available.
Yes, she is willing to work at this salary. But we look at is as a donation to society and to our city. If we have to look at her decision to be a teacher as a donation -- she is not payed enough!
Education as an industry is broken in many other ways that make it fail as a market. But in the scope of our discussion, she has chosen freely to accept the offer; the school has chosen freely to extend that offer to her. That's all that's necessary to prove my point.
Yes, she is willing to work at this salary. But we look at is as a donation to society and to our city.
I intentionally worded my reply so as not to limit my reference to her salary. I said her compensation, or her benefits. This includes the satisfaction that she gets from making "a donation to society and to our city". If that makes her feel good, then it's absolutely part of her compensation, part of the package deal that makes her accept the employment contract.
You can't say that you want a salary that in a vacuum matches the most mundane or unpleasant job, and then reap the additional job satisfaction yourself.
Think of it this way: would you take a job as an astronaut, getting paid nothing but room and board to do it? I, and I expect many other people, probably would. And we'd feel mighty lucky to have had that chance. Considering the satisfaction we got from actually going into space, the entirety of our compensation was enormous.
(Really, I'm not just babbling. This is how economics works. Those people who think that economists are only thinking about money couldn't be any farther from the truth. Economics is the study of why people make decisions, why they choose one alternative above another.)
It's a market because she has a choice.
> But we look at is as a donation to society and to our city.
Fair enough, but that doesn't imply that you're owed more.
If she's unhappy with her "donantion", she's free to not make it.
> If we have to look at her decision to be a teacher as a donation -- she is not payed enough!
News flash - almost everyone thinks that s\he is underpaid.
If you don't like the consequences of your choice, make a different one.
Wouldn't you rather have higher salaries and a higher barrier to entry thereby increasing the quality of education? Does this fit into the theory of incentives and economics? For eg., it is well known that Wall Street hires some of the best brains in the country; wouldn't society as a whole benefit from some fraction of the best brains in the country working to educate future generations as opposed to just those people who are satisfied (or have no other choice) with what the school system pays?
Which comes first? And might performance after entry into the occupation also be important for setting rates of compensation?
As long as we're fully omniscient, there are no costs in making changes and we're all perfectly rational, then all of existence is good enough! (if not, then by definition, we would choose the alternative of suicide)
This is not a requirement. In fact, that's the beauty of what the market does for you. All you need to know is your own utility function (and you are likely not even aware of that, it comes automatically), and the price (i.e., salary and other compensation). Friedrich Hayek won a Nobel Prize for demonstrating how pricing in a market distributes information, communicating the priorities and substitutability for everyone.
there are no costs in making changes
Of course there are costs in making changes. How could there not be? Surely you're not suggesting some magical world where everything is always magically altered to the optimum. Any time anyone is confronted with a choice, part of the decision making process is to consider the costs of changing. If that costs exceeds the benefits from the change, then you won't do it. So I don't see what you're trying to say in this phrase.
we're all perfectly rational
The rationality of actors is, admittedly, a matter of some controversy in modern economics. We know, for example, that people are systematically bad at handling values of extremely large or small scale, like the actual risks from terrorism -- we've badly overreacted to something that overall poses vanishingly small risk.
However, in this particular discussion -- a person's benefits from their employment, fully considering their job satisfaction -- then I don't think that anyone is in a position to debate. There is absolutely no way that anyone can second-guess another person's utility function (that is, their values and preferences, and how much a given thing improves their quality of life). We simply cannot know what is happening in another person's mind. Indeed, we frequently don't truthfully know our own motivations. Yet it's still clear that these preferences do exist, and that we take action on them. When talking about something this micro, we have no choice but to rely on a person's observed behavior. (For much better discussion of this, see Mises' Human Action).
good enough!
Well, yeah.
As an alternative to sarcasm, perhaps you could articulate an alternative explanation to my own. The only other that I can see is a Platonic top-down control, with a group of blessed decision-makers deciding what the relative values of everything ought to be. But there, you've still got the problems of omniscience, as well as forcing all participants to adhere to the same set of values, rather than allowing each of us to make our own choices.
Here's a more detailed response:
Switching costs matter greatly because it's possible that someone may feel that job B doesn't pay enough to compensate them for the unpleasantness involved, but job B is what they put 6 years of schooling into and they don't have the skills or qualifications for the more desirable job A.
Knowledge of how events will unfold, prescience, would be guarantee that one won't end up in job B after years of mistaken belief of being on track A. Prudence is some protection, but some people will still be unlucky.
Omniscience is the only absolute safeguard against making an unwise purchase. Many, many people buy defective goods every day. In the long term, those who do honest business should have an advantage, but the dishonest aren't all weeded out. In addition, it's possible to pursue an item (or a job) that isn't objectively flawed, but simply has no value to oneself. Without full self-knowledge, this can't be avoided completely. A person might believe a job that they are doing is a good deal when in fact, it is not. Radium jewelry painting was an extreme example.
And the gigantic elephant in the room that you were clearly trying to avoid was social good. Just because someone is willing to provide something for X amount of money doesn't mean that X amount of money is all it's worth to society. A cursory reading of economics would show that education is one such good. The return on an educated populace is so great that it's worth subsidizing. And that's exactly what this discussion is about. In the US, the pay for educators is low for the amount of schooling required, and the educators themselves are usually not drawn from the strongest of their classes. In many other countries, teaching is a highly competitive, highly paid, high prestige position.
FYI I have worked in education, both in the US and in east Asia. The difference is vast.
What are the most crucial differences that United States policy-makers should be aware of as they try to improve education in the United States? (For that matter, what should east Asian policy-makers learn from the United States?) I like the books by Liping Ma
http://www.amazon.com/Knowing-Teaching-Elementary-Mathematic...
and
James Stigler and James Hiebert
http://www.amazon.com/Teaching-Gap-Improving-Education-Class...
as examples of what the United States could learn from the practices of other countries, but perhaps you have other suggestions for readers here.
I know this isn't going to be a popular view, but some major problems in US schools are caused by an obsession with small class sizes. From everything I've seen, I'd say that the importance of small classes is dwarfed by that of having a good teacher. The smaller the classes are, the more teachers you need and the less selective you can be about them. I think this is one of the primary reasons the US (and just about every western country) spends so much more money per student than say Singapore and gets little to show for it.
In general, I like the system of Taiwan, Hong Kong and Singapore for earlier schooling. On the flip side, their weakness is college. What works well for giving everyone a basic grasp on fundamental skills doesn't work so well when they need to become self-directed learners. A lot of the current discussion is on increasing the focus on creativity and student autonomy, but there's a long, long way to go. The other huge problem is that after entering a school it's almost impossible to fail out of it and students not planning on grad school often just coast.
But tokenadult, you must have already known all that! In your earlier comments, haven't you said you've spent a huge chunk of your life in Taiwan, learned to read Chinese well and already critiqued children's teaching materials there?
I started out disagreeing with you, but we're definitely on the same page here. In the US, there's a cult of small class sizes. It frequently seems as if class size itself is taken as a proxy for the quality of the education, to the exclusion of any other factor.
But all the literature I've been able to find is inconclusive on the impact of class size -- and the very fact that it's inconclusive should boldly demonstrate that it's not the single, overriding factor. The only thing I can find that seems to be accepted is that smaller classes can help "at-risk" generally minority inner-city students who aren't getting educational support at home. But in the general case, nobody's been able to show conclusively that it's got any impact at all.
So why do we still make this an end goal rather than a means to an end?