"Just pay teachers according to the intrinsic value of their profession." But it's not immediately obvious what this means in practice. Suppose wages were set not by congress and not by the market. According to your moral calculus, what is the correct wage and how is it determined?
Similarly, hypothetically speaking, perhaps teachers are the most valuable profession to society, but if there's plenty of people willing to become a teacher, and plenty capable, there's no reason to reward these people with vast extra sums of money for the sake of their value.
Such a system would lead to extreme inefficient allocations of resources, an oversupply of teachers.
Yes, if teachers are valuable and you can't find people willing or capable to do the job, then by all means, raise their pay. That's the reason I think many teachers deserve more pay. Not because they're intrinsically valuable.
Public sector workers can leave for private wages, and for most comparable jobs, are paid similar wages, perhaps more so when adding benefits of most public sector jobs compared to volatility in private equivalents.
So maybe the wage is not the result of public artificial restriction, but of the value placed on the jobs themselves in the open job market.
Also not US teachers are among the highest paid in the world, certainly the OECD, likely because of Baumol's Cost Disease (which would imply US teachers are intrinsically overpaid, but receive the wages they do because schools must compete with outside even higher paying jobs to attract teachers). So perhaps it's not simply the US or public systems, but this is around the value on such skills worldwide.
So either the entire planet places similar utility on teaching as measured by pay, or the entire planet, public and private, has reached the same wrong conclusion.
a. Are accurately pricing teacher pay (if the upper bounds of private schools are any indication, we are not)
b. The downstream effects wouldn’t be catastrophic.
Certainly most American parents could not afford to properly educate themselves enough to do this job, let alone educate their children.
Finally, a miseducated generation of children would probably end up costing us trillions of dollars in incarceration, health care, etc.
You must think about the nth order effects of these things. Hence our completely inaccurate valuation of them.
Why would you look at the upper bounds?
> Private school teachers make way less than public school teachers. Average salaries are nearly $50,000 for public, and barely $36,000 for private.
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2013/10/why-ar...
Another problem with this line of reasoning is that people assume that they can always utilise 15m in a productive way or that not doing anything is not productive. How many times do you need a break everyday? How many times would a 15m break to relax and refocus or meditate actually benefit you rather than trying to force some work?
Of course people would get by, but their lives would be worse and advocating for making people's lives worse is kind of a shitty thing to do.
Also see both my points. You don’t know if their lives would get worse. You’ve just assumed that the main goal of everyone is to hyper optimise their lives.
[1] Because they have said they do, repeatedly, with their wallets.
If you inconvenience 100 million people by costing them 15 minutes more a day, or a few dollars more for lack of competition, then the cost per person may be low, but the cost altogether will be high.
This is the essential problem I see with the articles, they say so many jobs are useless, but often they're useful but only a small part of what is visible.