Quote:
Originally Posted by Tyrone Slothrop
The skills that lawyers, brokers and hedge-fund analysts have makes them more valuable in a market economy than teachers. The only crisis I can think of that has been severe enough to cause people to rethink that was when the Khmer Rouge took over in Cambodia, which was certainly a shock to the system but actually didn't turn out all that well for pretty much anybody. And in Cambodia today, I will wager that lawyers are paid more than teachers.
I know many of my kids' teachers. I like many of them. I am pretty sure that I could do what they do passably well. I am pretty sure that they could not do what I do. I am sympathetic with your notion that what they do is, on some level, more important. I do what I do partly in order to be able to pay to live in a nice neighborhood with good schools and better teachers. If I didn't have them to support, maybe I'd quit my job and write a novel.
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This is a neat way of writing the obvious. But my comment was a response to GGG's post in which he criticized low teacher pay. "Low" is relative, gauged against "high," and the high pay crowd includes, as you note, people like lawyers. So when a lawyer says, "It's greedy people who starve teachers," he's referring in part to himself. Teachers are paid what they can extract from the system, and the system - which benefits the lawyers here (and many other places) - has enormous leverage over teachers, and so pays them shit. If you really want to pay teachers well, you have to remedy the market structure that allows us to pay them so little. That would involve goring the oxe of people like, lawyers.
And I'm not talking about merely taxing lawyers more to pay teachers more. That would only drive up lawyer salaries even more. I mean reevaluating what's important, and paying people more based on actual societal value.
Salary disparities like those between teachers and merchant class professionals result from policy choices, not pure market dynamics. We could pay teachers a ton and lawyers like shit. The average teacher could go to law school and do what we do. We've decided to set up a license leveraging system (Milton Friedman's term for law and other non-hard science/non-physical-trade professions requiring licensure) that has caused the value of lawyers to rise much higher than that of teachers. That could be cured.
