Trust me, I don't work 3x harder than most of the people I make 3x of. My wife is a teacher and I am in tech, I make 3x her salary. She works way more and spends more of both her physical and emotional labor on her job. I work hard and I do good work, but what she does is not even in the same stratosphere as what I do. I'm not innovating anything, I'm just writing decent code. She's finding new ways to help kids learn. Which sounds more demoralizing?
It's not about how hard you work. It's about how many people can do what you do.
Don't sell yourself short, in tech you have skills that only a small percentage of the population are capable of doing. We might all say "Programming is easy" or "I really only work half the day" but for many people Programming is seen as witchcraft, and for many what would take a skilled developer an hour would take a whole day (or worse, they might just do the task manually).
If your not satisfied with programming you can of course go into teaching, if that's what you think is truly fulfilling.
It doesn't make it fair that in theory 'everyone' could get into it or that it takes probably much longer for someone to do my job than the other way around (like yes i think i would be able to sell things).
I don't know how we should incentive instead but it doesn't make it fair.
You're just basing your view of what's fair on time spent working/physical labor. If you base your view of what's fair on skillsets, and what one person can do, and what one person can not, it makes more sense.
It's worth asking why your wife doesn't switch to your job, to make 3x the salary. Either
a) she couldn't do it, in which case by extension it boils down to supply and demand, or
b) she doesn't want to do it, because she gets a whole bunch of joy from the job which is invisibly priced into compensation (and which indirectly goes back to supply and demand.)
I don't see the discrepancy as any kind of market failure.
I think there's a big problem with this whole comparison here. You're comparing a career which is almost entirely private-sector (programming) to one which is almost entirely public-sector (teaching). Teachers are mostly employed by local governments, after all, so that profession isn't subject to the market forces which affect private-sector jobs.
The reason teachers aren't paid well isn't because there isn't much demand for them, it's because the local governments choose to pay them poorly, and then they wonder why they can't find enough good teachers.
Companies that don't pay programmers handsomely will soon find themselves without programmers (or with really lousy ones), and then they'll go out of business. This doesn't happen with public schools.
> I don't see the discrepancy as any kind of market failure.
What his story underlines is that teaching young human beings about navigating life is rewarded 3x less than churing out code that fits some business objective.
The market doesn't care about people, it cares about profit. In that system, human life is only important to the degree that it helps market dynamics.
The main problem with teaching is that there's many people who can do it. If you compound the issue with paying teachers $150k a year, not only would the cost of education skyrocket, you would be running into more and more people unemployed but with a degree specifically meant for teaching.
I'm not saying everyone can teach equally. I'm saying most everyone can become qualified to teach. Please don't accuse me of saying teaching is easy. At the very least, a much larger subset can learn to teach than can learn to code.
Many people can learn to program and companies that pay poorly will only be able to hire people who aren't very good and they will go out of business. Finding good teachers is very hard as well but the government will only pay terrible salaries and mostly hire poor teachers. The difference is when the teachers suck and students do poorly, the school doesn't go out of business, they just reduce the budget and it gets worse.
>The difference is when the teachers suck and students do poorly, the school doesn't go out of business, they just reduce the budget and it gets worse.
This is true, but it's become a partisan issue, at least in the U.S, to talk about testing teachers in some way.
I believe a huge problem is finding a way to differentiate a good teacher from a bad teacher if you're not allowed to look at grades/some kind of standardized test. If you can take those into account, as long as a teacher comes into work on time I'm not sure how you could differentiate the good from bad.
An example I like to use is my AP Calc teacher from highschool, who had an average score of 4.7 for her students on the AP test. The average in 2012 was a 2.9 (the year I took it, it seems to be higher now, I can't say to as if they made it easier or if people got better though) [1]. In many school systems though, if your teacher has an average score below the national average, you can't do anything about it.
Part of the problem with doing that, especially in younger grades, is that so much of it depends on variables outside of a teacher's control. A lot of reading at a young age comes from life experiences. For instance, someone who has never been outside of an inner city is going to have more trouble reading a story about someone sailing on the ocean because they are so far removed from even the most basic plot elements that the things in the story that are actually meant to challenge are not ever gotten to. Additionally, time spent outside of classroom compounds the effectiveness of time spent inside of classroom, but the teacher has no control over that. A teacher can't even control if a student shows up for school or not. Student's performance, especially cross-school comparisons, are nearly worthless and would unfairly punish those that teach at low schools.
I would say you'd have to compare them to similar schools in the area or similar areas in the U.S. Between income range in the surround neighborhoods and population density you should be able to come up with a decent comparison, I would think.
I don't disagree with the letter of your comment, but I take issue with the spirit. Markets are about exchange, and the pricing signal is the aggregate expression of what people value and how scarce it is. Far from being cold and impersonal, they are fully and completely about human values.
OP's wife may place a high intrinsic value on teaching, which serves as a kind of internal subsidy. In that case you'd expect the job to pay less, because more people are being 'subsidized' by their desire to do it.
On the other hand, nobody is burning with desire to be a garbageman. Nobody is a volunteer garbageman, and garbagemen make more money than you might expect (or at least, they did when I was graduating from high school.)
There's a reason glamorous and fun jobs generally don't pay very much. It's not that complicated, and it's not sinister.
How so? Many people (women even moreso than men in my experience) prioritize fulfilling work over higher paying work. This is observable in, for example, people pursuing careers in saturated industries like journalism, art, or acting, as well as going for "more meaningful" startup jobs instead of FANG jobs.
I personally switched from rocket science to tech and then to a FANG so I could get increased compensation and have a chance of catching up to Bay Area housing prices. My compensation increased 3x in the process. Most of my peers wouldn't do that.
It's probably >3x more difficult to find someone with your skills to employ. It may be easy to you but to someone who doesn't know how to program, your work is unimaginably difficult.
I would also argue that writing code is a grind. I would enjoy writing code maybe 2-4 hours a day tops but when you want to get something done and code for 7 hours straight it is really tough to do.
Learning new concepts all the time, emotional waves, errors that can impact companies on a large scale. Programming is really difficult and requires constant engagement in the industry.
You're not taking into account the thousands of hours people have to put in to learning how to program. That's real work and sacrifice. It's not unfair that that investment pays off.
The teachers' situation is more demoralizing for sure.
Capitalism would explain the difference between a tech worker's pay and a teacher's pay as based on skill and worker scarcity, not on who works the hardest.
Teaching is a straw man. Teachers get paid poorly because (1) Americans don’t actually care about education, as evidenced by the amount teachers make, and (2) it’s a government-based monopoly that prioritizes “benefits” and graft (tenure, etc) over salary
> (1) Americans don’t actually care about education, as evidenced by the amount teachers make
Americans care very much about education but the system we're in doesn't. Kids have no value in a market economy until they have purchase power (or influence on purchase power). In a highly inequal society that means very fancy private schools, for those who can pay. And neglected public schools for the rest. The outlook of a market economy is not 18 years, it's 1 year (and often quarter-to-quarter).
Kids have massive purchasing power, a fact which was discovered by marketers in the 50s and cultivated extensively since then. Marketers back to then discovered they could actually market directly to kids, which wasn’t a thing before and something people take for granted now. In American households kids drive massive percentages of household spending, not just indirectly but directly as well.
> Kids have no value in a market economy until they have purchase power
Market economies are based entirely on investment. Market economies value investment and therefore kids. If people aren’t investing in kids, it’s because of market economy? as a matter of fact Americans invest tons of money in early childhood education and their children at an early age. It’s an American obsession. The problem is that outcomes have little to do with dollars invested. American culture at this point has devolved into pseudo fascist corporation and leisure identity worship, so people don’t even know what education is. Being a “geek” in America now means you watch tv and play video games. Buying your kid a tablet and plopping then down with some STEM edutainment software isn’t education. It’s just unfortunate, miguided ignorance, and we get what we pay for.
>Kids have massive purchasing power, a fact which was discovered by marketers in the 50s and cultivated extensively since then. Marketers back to then discovered they could actually market directly to kids, which wasn’t a thing before and something people take for granted now.
I dunno about "discovered", the 1950s were one of the most radical shifts in American life. Average Children were not running around with "purchasing power" prior to WWII they were working with their parents more than likely in some capacity, the war completely altered the economic landscape of America for a ceiling of better never before seen for the common man since we were the only ones left with infrastructure not bombed to fuck all. My grandparents are poor blacks from the south, that statistically puts them in the demographic set for worst possible outcomes, but they and most of their peers were able to raise large families and buy a house on factory jobs with middle-class wages in the 50s. That kind of wealth distribution opens up a lock of sectors.
>Americans care very much about education but the system we're in doesn't.
This is demonstrably false. If Americans cared about education, they would demand their local governments do a better job of providing it. But they don't. Those governments pay teachers poorly, which doesn't attract quality people to the profession, and the taxpayers just complain about their taxes being too high.
The ones who care about their kids' education enough to pay for it themselves—not just lobby to make others pay for it—and have the resources to do something about it tend to put their kids in private schools. That leaves only those who either lack sufficient resources to pay more or simply don't care.
In any case, we actually spend quite a bit on education, despite arguably worse outcomes than some other countries that spend less. Throwing more money at the problem isn't going to improve anything. The focus needs to be on spending the significant resources already allocated to education more effectively.
The attempts to equalize outcomes regardless of the amount of effort students (and parents) put into their education certainly don't help. Assuming they get their way and everyone is assured of equal pay for equal "effort"—why bother studying if cashiering at a fast-food joint offers about the same quality-of-life as managing a successful company, or performing leading-edge research and development?
But you use her in logic based arguments and then appeal to emotion so.... which is it?
Your gripe shouldn’t be with rich people, it should be with Americans en masse, who yelled and screamed all Sunday night in my apartment building about grown men running into each other on TV with such a passion you’d think they were educating their children. And then they’re poor? Boo hoo.
Maybe if Americans cared about education, showed passion for it like they do about Football, I would understand. You get paid 3x your wife because Americans care about what you produce, and they don't care about what she produces.
It’s easy to soak the rich but take a look around you, people prioritize everything except the one thing that matters: education.
> But you use her in logic based arguments and then appeal to emotion so.... which is it?
My appeal was to the amount of effort required between jobs.
> And then they’re poor? Boo hoo.
Poor people are allowed to have hobbies and interests just as well as the rich. This sentiment is disgusting and you should be ashamed.
> You get paid 3x your wife because Americans care about what you produce, and they don't care about what she produces.
Trust me, I have worked jobs where I have been paid very, very well where nobody has cared about what I produced except the couple of people who were paying me.
You won’t shame me. You can’t make me feel ashamed of my father, who got my family out of poverty and didn’t even know how to order a beer or a meal at a restaurant until he was 55 because that’s just not how we spent money. Your perspective is rooted in the heights of privilege and entitlement, wherein first world people can live cozy secure lives, entitled to leisure and “hobbies” on the backs of second and third worlders who facelessly supply us cheap goods that our rich should provision for us just because we live in a country that enslaves the world’s poor. That “hobbies” and “leisure” as a human right doesn’t give you pause is disturbing, because if you don’t earn your hobbies and leisure and expect them anyway, you’re a piece of work given what goes on in the world to make our leisure possible. Americans live in a Disney fairyland created by Ronald Reagan and the 1980s. Why should poor people in America be entitled to 50,000 USD when people who work and create the things these poor people say they absolutely need to consume make 5,000 USD. What haught, what arrogance. What willful ignorance. That’s what’s disgusting.
> You can’t make me feel ashamed of my father, who got my family out of poverty and didn’t even know how to order a beer or a meal at a restaurant until he was 55 because that’s just not how we spent money.
I never asked you to feel ashamed for that. I'm asking that you don't require everyone go though the same struggles as revenge.
Get this... I also think the people who are working to create the things that you are talking about should be able to have hobbies. I also think the people making the things that get consumed should be able to make enough to consume them. You are trying to turn my argument in to what you want it to be, not what it clearly is.
You are saying that, because I think people should be able to have better lives, I am saying some people should not have better lives? That doesn't even make sense.
Basic premise: it is undignified and immoral to buy things from people who labor tremendously and still live at a different standard of living, and to give those things for free to people here, at our standard of living. That just strikes me as incredibly twisted and immoral.
Imagine the look of those people in China who have to work to produce Tracfones, if they saw their Tracfone just given out to someone here for free, who didn't do anything to earn it? Imagine how they would feel? That feeling is not about revenge, it's about you denying them basic dignity. You're saying to him or her: you're a Chinaman, you have to do work, but we just take your work and give it to people for free. They must be better than you! They don't have to do anything because they're American. But you, you're just an inferior person from China so you have to work.
No I’m saying that things don’t fall from the sky. People make everything, and basic human dignity and justice demands that no one is just entitled to the fruits of someone else’s labor.
The revenge tack you take is also misguided. This is all about basic human dignity and people feeling like they deserve all this stuff from workers the world over, just because they live in a first world country. Or just because they live period. Being alive doesn’t entitle you to anything, and that’s probably where we disagree, because my guess is you think being alive entitles you to health care, and food and housing. But if that was true, and everyone took that entitlement, then where would all the actual stuff come from? Where? As I said, it’s the height of privilege to act like these things are human rights, because in doing so, you deny the workers who actually produce things common, basic dignity and equality.
I agree with you when it comes to "no one is just entitled to the fruits of someone else's labor". Certainly there is no inherent right to health care, food, housing, or anything else produced and paid for at others' expense. However, you're really confusing the issue by throwing in "on the backs of second and third worlders". It is not their labor which is being taken in order to provide these "entitled" residents of first-world countries their free stuff. They are getting paid for their labor, at rates better than what they could otherwise obtain, and would be strictly worse off if the first-world countries insisted on buying only from those with first-world standards of living. That would eliminate their comparative advantage, and take away what is currently their best option to earn a living and improve their situation. The workers in countries with second- and third-world standards of living are actually the main beneficiaries of this middle-class sense of entitlement; it transfers money from consumers and taxpayers in first-world countries directly into their wallets. If anyone is in a position to complain about having the fruits of their labor stolen away it's the net taxpayers in the first world, the ones actually paying for this "free" food, housing, and health care out of their own earnings.
