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Comment by unz | Hacker News Reader

The sociologist is making way too much money for a government job, our tax dollars at work.

The low-paying dangerous occupations are only that way because there's so many foolish men to take them up.

And you can blame the education system for turning out those foolish men - so a lot of that can be directly blamed on the corrupt teaching unions - whose main interest is in increasing pay and lowering work requirements.

This is where edu startups can come in and help society while earning money.

- Retrain the low pay workers into web designers and app developers. Gamify the education system and make profits by selling high-scoring students to corps that need them.

- Disrupt the teachers union with apps and websites that allow people to form ad-hoc schools outside the system - homeschooling 2.0.

As PG says - kill hollywood and kill government education.

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This rant really confuses me....

* All sociologist jobs are government jobs? Citation needed.

* Dangerous low pay jobs are the result of public education system? This model lacks explanatory power. There have always been low-pay dangerous jobs. These occur in times and places where there is no public education system. They occur in times and places where there is a public education system. They occur in proportions (as related to other available jobs) that seem unrelated to the existence of teacher unions. Rather they seem to be a function of economic development level, with a healthy mix of labor law based restrictions.

Essentially, this rant seems to be off topic soap boxing. Given the "green" username - probably some form of sock-puppetry.

Wow, that's pretty rude.

The sociologist in the article - getting paid over 120k. Read the article before jumping with rage.

Basic economics - the low pay is a result of oversupply of people willing to do the work. The oversupply is because many uneducated men being churned out from k12. k12 is run by teachers.

I'm quite sure you're a teacher or your parents were teacher, that explains the rage (By the way, one of my parents was a teacher, but I'm not going to use that to excuse the system).

To be blunt it is because you are trolling and being a dick.

The doc Waiting For Superman is a troll and dick. So is Michelle Ree. So are supply and demand curves. Sure.

At what point in "Waiting for Superman" do they explain that the propensity for trees to fall on lumberjacks is caused by a nefarious cabal of teachers?

Disagreement is not rage. Questioning your position is not rage. Questioning how a comment is topical is not rage.

The model you are proposing has great post-hoc explanatory powers within the united states - however it does not appear to have predictive powers over what we will find in other places and times. Therefore I question it's validity, until you can show how the same model applies to other situations, and can show exigent factors that are relevant when it doesn't apply. Again, this is not rage - this is merely not accepting an insufficiently explained model at face value.

FWIW (not that it matters): I am a software engineer/programmer, my parents are in sales and HR, my other family members are not in education either. I just think overly simple explanations should always be questioned.

As for the salary of a government worker - that depends on the job they do, the value they create etc. I don't know the details to make blanket statements. I think there is a tradeoff - good people doing the job requires competitive salary, paying bad salaries is generally more expensive as it requires more workers to do the same job.

You said 'rant' twice, not exactly polite disagreement.

The models are pretty simple - they are called supply and demand. They work for everything else in economics. Low pay for dangerous work is not so exceptional situation.

In poorer countries, there is even less pay for even more dangerous work, because education is even worse there. There's a few data points there.

And there's quite a lot of literature on the education system and teacher unions. To start off with their's Waiting For Superman (2010).

Until there is data, not talking points or vague references to other models, it is in face just a rant. What is the actual supply? What is the actual demand? What is the curve function for the supply and demand lines for education and workers? What factors of those functions are accounting for teacher unions and what is the source data that you used to fit those functions in your model. I don't mean a handful of words - I mean actual data with numbers, or at least a citation to a work that has that available. Waiting for Superman may include those - I haven't read it.

As for the attempt to derail over "politeness concerns" because I used the word rant - I won't bite.

Looking at your posting history you appear to be a professional forum arguer/troll and would be in full agreement if you hadn't started off with the opposite stance, so I'll end it there.

By the way, very few of your comments have data backing them up, and often are just simple 'models' with some variables you wrote down mixed in with rudeness to other commenters.

Wait what? This is a full move into ad hominem. Just because you don't like my request for more information and a better explanation, or don't like my past involvement with trolls, doesn't mean my point is invalid.

I am merely requesting more information on your claims.

Dangerous jobs like Roustabout and Miner are not badly paid but they are "dirty" jobs and attract a premium I was at a training course recently and we had a couple of Pit deputy's (ie mine supervisors) on the course.

They said that the going rate for a single 12 hour weekend overtime shift was $2350 and that some of their "young lads" could clear 125k in a year. This is around 4 times the UK Median wage.

Miners in Australia also could command a very good wage

It's quite easy to test your hypothesis: Let's see if there are any "low-paying dangerous occupations" in countries without "corrupt teaching unions". Guess what? There are! Time to wipe the chalkboard again I'm afraid...

Yes. Scandinavian countries and Australia have a lot less low paying jobs that are dangerous. Guess what - teaching system is also working better there than US/UK.

So, you are studying the habits of the scandinavian countries for ways to kill government education?

Somehow they've educated the populace into not accepting low pay for dangerous work. Personally I'd prefer good privatised education, but good government education is OK alternative.

They have a lot less low paying jobs full stop. But this is mainly due to, guess what... unions and government intervention!

Except in America only teachers unions (along with doctors/lawyers) have managed to raise the salary through (anti-consumer) unions, while the lumberjack/fisherman/roofer is thrown to the wolves. 'Unions for everyone' or 'unions for none' - the only fair way. 'Unions for the connected' and 'to hell with you' for everyone else is unfair, and the startup community should seek to destroy it.

In your utopia, when all the “foolish men” who have been led astray by the evil teachers unions are retrained as web designers, what will you do when your roof needs to be replaced?

Pay a more reasonable rate for the dangerous job. I don't only think about my own personal needs, I'm also thinking about the welfare of those low paid men and their families. Roofers deserve more pay than hipster designers.

In that case, why on earth would you want to retrain them as web designers?

So the remaining roofers get higher pay, and the in-flood of designers leads to lower pay for designers.

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