Meaningful work is desirable, people are willing to do meaningful work for less pay, this results in meaningful work being paid less. (This is a existential crisis realization for me.)
Is there anything to prevent the pay for our most important and meaningful jobs from approaching zero?
Value (as in profit generating value) and meaning are different things. This explains why meaningful work is not necessarily valuable work. But here's the thing, why aren't value and meaning aligned? Don't we want to value and pay for things we find meaningful? This misalignment seems to be an underlying cause of many problems--the root of all evil even.
David Graeber addresses precisely this in several pieces that ultimately became the book _Bullshit Jobs_. Here is a snippet from a relevant interview[1].
"What happened? Well, I think part of it is a hypertrophy of this drive to validate work as a thing in itself. It used to be that Americans mostly subscribed to a rough-and-ready version of the labor theory of value. Everything we see around us that we consider beautiful, useful, or important was made that way by people who sank their physical and mental efforts into creating and maintaining it. Work is valuable insofar as it creates these things that people like and need. Since the beginning of the 20th century, there has been an enormous effort on the part of the people running this country to turn that around: to convince everyone that value really comes from the minds and visions of entrepreneurs, and that ordinary working people are just mindless robots who bring those visions to reality.
But at the same time, they’ve had to validate work on some level, so they’ve simultaneously been telling us: work is a value in itself. It creates discipline, maturity, or some such, and anyone who doesn’t work most of the time at something they don’t enjoy is a bad person, lazy, dangerous, parasitical. So work is valuable whether or not it produces anything of value."
Survival, yes, and happiness to a certain extent. This is probably one of the most important realisations of the 20th Century, that by providing for the basic needs of everyone (and thereby essentially amortizing those costs over the entire population), we can produce overall better results for the country (measured in efficiency, production, happiness, etc).
So by setting up a national health service in the UK, you ensure a base level of health across the whole country. By providing free education (and free higher education), you ensure that the workforce is more skilled, and able to make a wider range of choices. By providing basic housing, food, etc to those who need it, you prevent people having to opt out of society in order to survive.
This sort of safety net is cheaper in the long run (it's worth watching Unlearning Economics' video "Free Stuff is Good Actually", which goes into detail on this point), but it's also fundamentally about freedom. If you have access to free education, you can make choices about your career and life that you just couldn't before. If you have free healthcare and financial support if you get sick, you can continue working for longer, but you'll also have more time to make bad choices and weird choices - the sorts of choices that are fundamental to healthy entrepreneurship. If you have a financial safety net, you can take more interesting risks, because the consequences are less severe.
So yeah, I think if you believe freedom is a virtue, then I think you also need to see it as a virtue for people to be supplied with the tools that can give them freedom.
You didn't answer the question. Taking for granted that insurance and social welfare safety nets are good for civilized society, it's also useful to recognize that they're not free; someone has to work to pay for them. Do you see any virtue in wanting to work so that others don't have to carry as much of your weight? Or do you only value the virtue in other people being willing to pay your way for you?
It sounds like you might be suggesting I was conflating or blaming Protestant ideals for evil Nazi actions. Instead, I am pointing out an earlier cultural influence that persisted. In a way, there’s something far more sinister about the idea that a Nazi believed there was some sort of genuine freedom to be had, as opposed to it being outright malicious.
“He seems not to have intended it as a mockery, nor even to have intended it literally, as a false promise that those who worked to exhaustion would eventually be released, but rather as a kind of mystical declaration that self-sacrifice in the form of endless labor does in itself bring a kind of spiritual freedom”
Hard, disgusting, dangerous jobs are needed for society to work. You need to pay for those, otherwise nobody will do them.
Easy, motivating, well perceived by society jobs are very appealing, and if they got the same money as the others, society would collapse as nobody would do the first ones.
That is unless you force people to do the hard jobs and pay them the same as the people you assign to the nice jobs.
Let's not pretend that stuff like software development or finance, some of the best paying careers there are, are "hard, disgusting or dangerous". Jobs are simply paid on the value they create vs the supply of workers available to do those jobs.
> some of the best paying careers there are, are "hard, disgusting or dangerous".
In these cases, there is still something choking the supply side. In the case of software, its having the curiosity, intelligence and discipline to actually learn the skillset to the point where they can create the value. I've met plenty of people who wanted to learn to code that fell apart as soon as they tried writing anything past "hello world"
The education can be grueling, you have to spend lots of time in the computer lab while your friends in other majors are drinking/partying. A lot of people claim we develop bad mental health and social skills. That definitely limits supply somewhat.
The idea that you have to be social recluse to be good at programming is beyond laughable. There’s definitely the opportunity for it and there’s definitely plenty of people in that category.
But there’s plenty of us who are experts in the field, yet still know how to sit down for a cold beer on a hot day.
I didn’t go to a party school, so maybe my experience is biased. Also, the period I went was before CS was a mainstream major, so maybe things are different now.
I don't think so. I got my CS degree twenty five years ago. "Grueling" is pretty much the last word I'd use to describe my journey. I never went to class, spent the whole time smoking weed and gaming. I'm essentially a self-taught programmer, and if I can do it, almost anyone else could do it better and faster.
From my understanding in faang, this probably only applies to levels below senior. From senior onwards, coding is no longer a priority. U will need to work with multiple ppl and teams. Delegate the work. Communicate and champion ur projects. Interpersonal skills becomes as important as your technical skills
completely true but at that point you've been in the industry for a few years and already know how to code. hopefully you'll have spent some of that free time catching up on the social skill if you minmaxed on knowledge acquisition in university.
personally I completely understand the idea of a lone wolf coder. I'm self taught and started aggressively learning web development while working a dead end job. At some point I realized if I hung out with my coworkers and smoked weed/drank after hours with them like everyone else was doing, this is what Id be doing for the rest of my life. You're the average of the people you hang out with. if the average is hell bent on mediocrity and thats not what you want, isolation is just what you have to do till you are good enough to find a new crew.
As also stated by you that it doesn't take long to reach there. Average software engineers could reach there within 5-7 years. Assuming that a person only started taking cs in university and started working after graduation, that still puts him at this level below 30s. That's not counting the ppl who started programming young, or the ppl who learn faster than average, or the ppl didn't graduate and went straight to work, etc.
My point is that OP's points really only applies to the ppl who are new to the job. Inter-person skills comes into the play in just a few years.
Software development or finance tend to be hard, lacking meaning, and not well seen by society.
You're not going to come across as virtuous to anyone if you're in finance, as opposed to if you decide to be a firefighter. When you have multiple variables, coming up with examples that stretch just one will not give you a right answer.
I agree ultimately supply is the main driver, I have another comment in the thread about it.
Even sillier jobs mostly pay on first order value. That is why I refuse to work in any department that the larger organization deems a cost-center: in my experience such jobs consistently pay less!
Creating “value” for shareholders, “value” for your clients… I started to really dislike the use of value without a descriptor. It often feels like it implies the work of nurses, teachers, first-responders isn't as valuable as the work of software development or finance. Just because some jobs have a higher monetary value, doesn't mean its societal value is also high.
It's supply and demand - the whole idea is that the high pay will encourage people to move into where supply of labour is needed. It's just that, as some people are finding out, not everyone can code, and especially, not everyone can engineer.
You have this completely backwards. The lower a job pays, the more likely it is to be dangerous or disgusting. Some of the very lowest paying jobs are the most dangerous (lumberjacks) or the most disgusting (janitors).
In the end it's all supply and demand, there is no causal connection between low pay and dangerous/disgusting work, quite the opposite. If a job is dangerous or disgusting and still low paid, it just means that the barrier to entry is even lower. Anyone with two arms and legs can be a janitor.
True. Also, there are definitely traditions and notions about better and worse jobs which play a role, besides supply and demand.
In some countries salaries for some jobs do not rise even though there is a clear lack of supply. But they just cannot move the salaries up (by much), for not disturbing their artificial salary hierarchy. You cannot pay the nurse better than the physician, even if you are direly lacking nurses and have a surplus on the physician side. Well, you could, but nobody actually does it.
Isn’t supply and demand the right solution here? Low pay means less people want to be teachers or change careers. Then there is a teacher supply crisis, and pay has to go up to deal with that. Since you can’t force people to do the job if they think it is not worth doing, can’t we reach an equilibrium?
And if teacher shortages persist without pay being touched, isn’t that to be expected?
Supply and demand OF HOUSING, yes. Increasing the pay of Teachers, then Nurses, then Fire Fighters, then ... by (say) 2X - because housing is too expensive for them - does not create any new housing. Though it may bid up the prices on the least-expensive existing housing, putting yet more essential professions on the "2X" list. And quite a few other undesirable side-effects.
As long as they are on an equal footing with everyone else, then either more housing is built or there is a generic housing crisis unrelated to being a teacher status, and the problem we should be talking about is something else.
either would work. If you pay teachers enough, they would commute several hours if needed. If you pay everyone more, either the housing gets built or people leave because you cant pay everyone enough to keep jobs filled.
The problem is that the pay is artificially suppressed. The school is not able to increase pay because the government will not give them the money. So they either sell all their equipment to try and fund it or lose all the teachers.
But isn’t this just a “water is wet” article then? Yes, if slavery isn’t an option, people are either paid well enough that they don’t walk, or they walk.
The parent comment mentioned the disalignment of value and meaning. The now - later time axis is a clear explanation for part-to-most of that disalignment.
Think of prestige jobs that pay less, or unpaid internships. People aren't eager to do those out of the goodness of their hearts - they are trying to bank social capital or experience that will pay off in the future.
Now think of teachers. They are paid less than other jobs for the same qualifications. Why? Part of their salary is paid in meaning, the chance to influence the future through impressionable minds.
How about meaning in terms of artistic messages, religious teachings, or instant epiphanies? Those are the crystallization / compression of wisdom learned over long periods of time.
>Is there anything to prevent the pay for our most important and meaningful jobs from approaching zero?
If people are willing to do something for free, why should we pay above that? If there aren't enough people willing to do it for free, we can raise the prices we offer until we get enough takers. This is microeconomics 101. The implied problem of "if the pay for our most important and meaningful jobs approach zero, wouldn't there be no one to do it?" doesn't exist, and makes as much sense as "Nobody goes there anymore, it's too crowded!"
Yeah. It’s the wrong argument, really. Economics isn’t a charity. You can’t really argue “I deserve to be paid more!” (Unless you’re not into capitalism, which is valid)
I think the more valid foundational argument is whether or not the government is incorruptly ensuring the system is functioning equitably.
That is: the solution to this perceived problem isn’t to tip the scale. It’s to ensure the scale isn’t being tipped.
Economic concerns are bigger than that. Quality of education is core to a well functioning society. A dollar spend now on education is worth the investment.
Yes, but there's no evidence that throwing more money at the problem results in better outcomes
https://youtu.be/f0JorXgqxiU
Camden can be the highest funded and lowest performing school in the state.
Inner city schools often have the highest amount of money available and lowest performance
There's a danger in classifying education as an investment. If I look at how my investments are performing, and I see a broad group that isn't doing well, I don't shrug and say "thems the breaks", I move my money where it will do better. To bring this back to the topic, if we look at the outcomes from "investing" in majority-minority school districts, are we going to decide that it's yielding appropriate returns? If not, what happens next?
It’s not really a capitalism thing (private ownership) as much as a free market/market economy thing. Although intertwined they aren’t necessarily the same thing. IMO a lot of gripes about “capitalism” are really grievances with competing in the market economy.
Interesting phenomenon, actually. I wonder if market pricing for teachers would result in higher pay or more teachers: I.e. if lowering pay were easy, or if firing were easy.
Certainly some aspect of compensation must pay for the hiring risk.
And the other thing is that government organizations are slow to react to market forces, so as the majority employer in the space, they're frequently likely to just be behind. Some sort of incentive mechanism for cost cutting may work but it's hard to build that without it misfiring.
If I were in charge of an education system, I'd definitely hard bargain to keep teacher costs low because in downturns it's the cost I have least control over managing. There'd be a delta in the fair market price as a result.
In addition, my boss would likely also try to keep my budget low since if any extra would go into the piece that has most market power - unionized labour.
Teachers aren’t robots, it’s not just an important to have a bum in the seat. The quality of the teacher has a large impact on student outcomes, and if reasonable wages aren’t available many potentially excellent teachers will do something else while only the most incompetent will go into the profession.
It is simply about supply and demand right. There are too many qualified people in the market who can teach. So, their market value is low. Same thing for flipping burgers as well.
Likewise, there are not enough qualified people who can perform angioplasty surgery so medical professionals get paid a shit ton.
All this notion about "meaningful work" etc is just a sugarcoating of the truth. Plenty of teachers would happily quit their job permanently if they hit the lotto.
Yes, and it's because of monetary manipulation. Value creation tends to feel meaningful. It's unfortunate that our current system rewards self-flagellation over value creation.
But I guess the top 1% don't want to live among happy people. They'd rather the masses be self-loathing, exploitable commodities than fulfilled human beings.
And sadly, it often seems that the masses are just too dumb to even trust their own senses.
I think probably only a small minority are evil. I have some answers because I've faced many of the problems. It doesn't require much brain to figure things out, just a lot of wrong places, wrong times.
It's easy to have answers when you don't have to really solve the problem, when you actually have to go and fix the problem yourself that's when you really face the problem and those answers are hard won. But I admire those who do tackle such problems or at least attempt too. The cost of real problem solving few will actually try to endure. It's messy, not straightforward and often a compromise you never wanted.
A thought experiment. If the problems (housing for teachers, for example) could be solved in a way which demoted "the 1%" from their position, would they be evil for not accepting that solution?
"Is there anything to prevent the pay for our most important and meaningful jobs from approaching zero?"
One way is to raise the bar so it is harder to become a teacher and increase pay.
The problem though, is in the U.S., pay differential is very much geographical. There are plenty of teachers in the NY and NJ making $125,000, whereas in other parts of the country, it's less than 1/3rd of that.
> Is there anything to prevent the pay for our most important and meaningful jobs from approaching zero?
The real blackpill here is that there's very little evidence that teachers matter at all. I mean somebody has to be there to supervise the kids and read from the workbook and it'd be nice if it were somebody trustworthy and reliable, so we might want to require proxies for that (like a 4-year degree), but beyond that the evidence just isn't there that it matters that much.
I reject the entire premise, in other words. Teachers do work that needs to be done, but they aren't individually important and almost anybody can do it. That's why the work isn't more remunerative. (Although it actually pays quite well (in the U.S. at least) for what it is.)
Some of my teachers regressed me. Some of my teachers SAVED me.
In particular, at a formative age (and when we only had one teacher for all subjects):
- 8 year old: I still feel very uncomfortable (and really quite sad), when I think of my classroom experience. Horrible. I regressed and was getting Ds and Es. The teacher was dismissive and belittling. I stagnated socially.
- 9 year old: Average teacher / no particular change.
- 10 year old: Incredible teacher that brought me from D/E to A/B, but more importantly brought me out of my shell.
Perhaps others in my 8YO class had different experiences, but regardless - I can't reconcile your statement "there's very little evidence that teachers matter at all" to my experience.
Perhaps you're meaning 'in terms of skill level', and perhaps increased wages wouldn't correlate to 'better' teachers as I am defining 'better'. But 'they aren't individually important and almost anybody can do it' doesn't strike me as true at all.
Edit: Also, I was having.... a bad time, at home and outside of it (No shade on my parents). I am so thankful of my 10YO teacher. They were the only person able to see it and in a position to help, and help they did (as much as could be done).
That is not at all what GP is saying. What they said, very clearly, is they believe anyone who can stand in front of a class, maintain some control, and read from a workbook is equal to all other people who can do the same.
Ridiculous claim IMO and is dismissible on the basis of most people’s own experiences, but that’s what they’re claiming.
Sometimes if I go into the same coffee shop every day for a couple years I will develop a rapport with one of the baristas and, of course, I like some of them better than others. Maybe one in ten ends up being so nice that they are memorable.
But none of that changes that new baristas can be trained to do their job in a few days and almost anybody can do the work.
Your claim is closer to “there’s no difference between a good and bad barista.” Of course there is. And of course closing the gap between a good and bad barista is much easier than closing the gap between a good and bad teacher.
If you take any person off the street and have them make you a cappuccino, you will absolutely regret it. But apparently you don’t believe this is true of teaching children?
All your evidence points to a much, much simpler explanation: most teachers are just average, and even exceptionally good or bad teachers can have their own exceptionalism overpowered by other factors.
This does not mean it would be wise or yield just-as-good or better results by throwing any person off the street into this role, which would be the natural implication of “it doesn’t matter which individuals you put in front of the classroom.”
What's interesting about this to me is just how obvious it is that somebody with 99th-percentile verbal skills and the ability to explain difficult topics clearly should be doing what that second guy is doing, not working one-on-one with individual students.
I think you might be right for general education. But in more free market economies (take Indian high and higher secondary education for instance), the right teachers command a market premium for their ability to successfully either identify children who will do best on entrance exams or train them into those.
Coaching classes are effectively highly paid teaching jobs though the majority of teachers are not paid well.
This perhaps points to the idea that this market is near winner take all. I was hoping that remote education would have transformed teaching into a perfect winner take all.
However, it looks like the "keeping order" part is significant. Perhaps there are many children who need to be bootstrapped into self-directedness. I know I had to be. But I was by my parents.
I agree, there are hundreds of comments in this post, which is not at all unusual for these kinds of societal topics, yet very few actually clarified the basics.
The goals, desires, motivations, assumptions, etc., of the various parties and groups involved.
Without this, the vast majority of effort seems to be spent going in circles. Some might be convinced from position A to B, some might be convinced from position B to C, and some might be convinced from position C to A.
I went to what I assume was a fairly typical U.S. public school (if maybe a little smaller than average) and, sure, I had some teachers I liked better than others, but I don't think any of them made any difference. (And remember, the argument here isn't that the player on the field never caught a popup; it's that they didn't do it any better than any other random person could have.)
In fact, since my town was pretty small, I actually started kindergarten with a lot of the same people I graduated high school with, so I knew these people across their entire primary and secondary educational experiences. And, basically, things more or less shook out exactly how you could have predicted if you'd just have given my entire kindergarten class IQ tests and pre-registered SAT/ACT scores on that one data point.
Yeah I went to public school in San Francisco and the consensus among my friends (in high school) was that fully half our teachers were quite literally insane. Like "should be in an institution (not a school)" crazy.
We felt that the fact that the adults in the situation (parents, teachers, the PTA, the school admin, the Education System up to the Board of Education, and society en mass didn't do something about this, that instead our teachers were half of a insane asylum, really put a damper on our enthusiasm for the whole thing.
That’s just evidence that relative performance within a group is not affected when the entire group goes through roughly the same experiences. This is obviously true and is completely orthogonal to “the individual teachers don’t matter.”
That would be true except that we see the same thing across school districts. (There’s no evidence that teacher ability predicts district-level outcomes, either.)
I don't think they are at any risk of "approaching zero". Like government jobs in any country (police, bus drivers, bureaucracy, nurses) they simply aren't the most lucrative.
Moral meaningfulness has zero to do with economic value.
Literally everyone alive is capable of teaching at some level. And the education requirement to teach higher levels is not as complicated or long as many other professions.
So lots and lots of qualified or easily qualifiable candidates for a position equates to a lower economic value for that position.
Any other outcome would be both economically and morally perverse.
No. To teach in a school in Australia you would normally need a degree plus some educational qualification, typically a postgraduate Diploma of Education. The absolute fastest time to obtain this normal level of education is four calendar years. This is not "walk in" job. It's a professional career with a significant formal training requirement.
(Source: One of my parents worked at a teacher's union, many of my friends are teachers, and I too studied teaching briefly)
Half of all adults in Australia have a 4 year degree. To add a specialization in education and meet the requirement it's just another year for those people. Hence, "easily qualifiable".
As the salary increases, the pool of potential and interested applicants rises dramatically.
That's the problem with vague subjective statements: shifting goalposts in conversation. Being "right" is less important than saying something useful and verifiable.
From my perspective I haven't moved any goalposts. I'm only adding specificity to what I already said.
I didn't make it more specific before because I don't care to spend all day typing on my phone. If this is a conversation, we'll slowly make progress to reaching a shared understanding of each other's viewpoint and at what level of ambiguity we agree or disagree at.
To that end, this isn't a debate, it's an exploration of perspectives, each round adding specificity.
Given that we're talking about a hugely macroeconomic issue, my definition of "easily" is even more broad than what I've presented here. At the end of the day, my point is just that there's a mutlidimensional spectrum of pay versus education requirements vs potebtial applicants that exists. A century ago, kids were being taught similar subjects by people who lacked any degree at all. So the licensing requirements are pretty arbitrary, likely an artifact of regulatory capture by teachers unions to preserve formerly relatively high standards of loving. That has changed of course but the barrier hasn't.
The amount of flexibility in delivering sufficient education to kids is WAY more than in building bridges for instance because our ability to measure quality is greater in engineering fields than in education.
That's not an ethics argument. As could be inferred by the fact that it is in favor of paying a lesser amount tangible property due to the arguable benefit of an intangible concept that no one owns.
However, meaningfullness can't be accounted for given any individual teacher. Some hate their job, just as in every other profession.
Instead, it's a justification for offering less property for work.
It is not dissimilar, and may be ethically worse, to the hypothetical justification to lessen funding for homeless people: "well, at least they are getting fresh air".
No this isn't the problem. There is huge demand for skilled teachers as in teachers that are extremely good at their job. Huge demand. There's also too little supply. It Could be a lucrative career if the system were setup better.
Think about it. When you were in school how many good teachers were there? Very very very few.
Now think further... Any school you went to.. did you have the opportunity to choose the school based on how good the teachers are?
And therein lies the mismatch. Top schools aren't associated with good teachers. It's basically a crap shoot... you select the school based off of some prestige factor that's independent of teacher skill. Then within the school you have limited selection based off of informal "ratemyprofessor.com" reviews.
There needs to be official records and ways to measure teacher skill and hiring must be made off of these records. This will increase teacher pay. Until then teachers will be paid shit.
Imagine a university that did specifically this. You'd have a school where every teacher was freaking phenomenal. I, personally, went to a uni with a pretty high prestige factor on the west coast of the US and of course, ironically, the higher the prestige the shittier the teachers. I would drop all of that to attend the aforementioned hypothetical school.
And of course to stay in line with the topic because this hypothetical school would be more in demand the school would pay more. Teachers all over the industry would being to raise their own skill level and hiring would only be based on actual really good teachers rather then anybody who can speak English.
> But here's the thing, why aren't value and meaning aligned? Don't we want to value and pay for things we find meaningful?
Under capitalist systems, the only way to align value and meaning is for meaning to be profitable. If you can't make a buck off it, then what's the point of doing it?
I’m not sure I see the point of you telling me that you have sex with your wife. We are talking about aligning value and meaning.
Edit: since I’m rate limited now and I don’t really intend to come back to this discussion later, I’ll leave my reply to you here and leave it at that:
Okay, but you could have done that without bringing your personal sex life into the discussion.
Either way, that you have sex with your wife doesn’t say anything about the alignment or misalignment of value and meaning in capitalist societies. It’s perfectly possible for you to have meaningful sex with your wife, and for that to not be encouraged by capitalism as a valuable activity. In fact, in America there’s an issue with birthrates because younger generations cannot afford families, healthcare and education, but we make sure they can get cheap loans for cars and TVs are affordable. That’s the misalignment I’m talking about.
Have a good one and please leave your personal sex life out of future comments. I’m sure you can find another relatable way to frame your point.
The point is to demonstrate a clear and relatable example of something the vast majority of humans doing without making a buck off of it. In fact, people will spend money to do it where it is legal.
It's unclear to me why you think economics should be about aligning value and worker meaning at all.
Another way to think about it is that the capitalist system does a great job of aligning value and meaning, just on the consumer side and not the producer side. Compensation is based on what meaning someone else finds in your work and will pay you for it. It seems rather silly to have a system where workers are compensated for work they find meaningful but no one else does.
Capitalist systems also don't have a great way of measuring value that doesn't include a monetary exchange. For example - if I fix my neighbor's computer, and he gives me a dozen eggs from his chickens, we've exchanged tangible value (we've both benefitted from the exchange), but under a capitalist system, the value of that exchange was unmeasurable (since no money changed hands). You could convert it to a market rate analysis, but that mostly never happens.
Similarly, if a parent stays at home and takes care of the kids - that's economic value. But it will only show up in the statistics if the parent takes care of someone else's kids and hires someone to take care of their own (since that's economic exchange).
One trend of capitalism was taking a lot of this "implicit" or off-balance-sheet value creation and making it explicit.
You are mixing up having a monetary system and having a capitalist system, and I don't see how it relates to the topic.
You also said that capitalism is bad at measuring off balance sheet value creation, and then say a fundamental trend of capitalism is to take off balance value and make it explicit. Which is it and why do you think it's a problem?
Why does it matter if capitalism doesn't put a price on a mother raising her own child? You seem to imply that a better economic system should put a price on this activity. Why? Should someone be paying a parent or raising their own child, and who?
One aspect of capitalism is that an individuals get to choose what they value and pay for it. Why should I pay mother to raise her child without choice?
If for some reason I found value in her raising her child or mine, there is nothing in a capitalist system that stops me from setting up price and paying them to do it
Because it's enjoyable? A lot of what people do is for enjoyment. Many times someone else can profit from that, but the underlying motivation of the demand is not money.
Imo, insects are the only creatures with societies rivaling the size and complexity of ours. Ants cultivate plants, maintain nurseries, execute emergency response protocols when disasters hit, conduct expeditions to find new food sources, cooperate to complete tasks etc.
>Housing is considered unaffordable if a person spends more than 30% of their income on housing costs—sometimes called being in housing stress.
How does this compare to the overall population? This feels like one of those rules of thumb from a bygone era where housing was cheap and affordable, but today is no longer valid. It's obvious that the authors of the article is trying to push the narrative that teachers are underpaid, but using this contrived way of arguing (ie. housing is "unaffordable" for them according to this arbitrary cut-off, therefore they're underpaid) rather than straightforward metrics (eg. "they make x% below people with the same education levels") makes me think they're trying to mislead.
The problem isn’t that the 30% rule isn’t a good idea anymore. The problem is that for so much of the population it isn’t realistic anymore.
Also I wouldn’t be surprised if a terms like housing stress based on the 30% rule is part of official terminology. So it can be used for discussing rental rates, morgage prices and legislation.
Looking at averages like you propose isn’t useful if something bad impacts a whole population.
If teachers are not meaningfully different from the rest of similarly situated citizens, then raising teacher pay alone isn’t the answer. (Maybe building more housing is.)
Yep, since housing has became too expensive almost everywhere for almost everyone. Instead of focusing on one specific profession, we should focus on policy, where we actually built more houses (by allowing more to be built and at higher density), make houses houses, not hotels (so ban stuff like airbnb) and make housing-as-an-investment impossible (by eg limiting the amount of houses someone can own in areas with high demand).
But a few rich people would lose some money if we did that, so no, we'll focus on teachers in australia only.
I generally agree, but one small disagreement: housing-as-an-investment can be important for having a robust and affordable housing rental market. Every rental agreement has an investor on one side of it.
The problem is that percentages still only go up to 100. If housing now costs a larger percentage of people's income, plus everything else is more expensive too, that's a huge problem, and a noticeable decrease in standard of living.
My point isn't that housing costs as % of income can go arbitrarily high without any negative impacts, it's that the study/headline is misleading the reader using a definition of "unaffordable" that is inconsistent with their expectations. "Unaffordable" makes me think that the teachers are struggling to meet rent and have to cut non-discretionary spending to make ends meet, whereas the reality (ie. the 30% mark used by the study) is closer to "have less discretionary spending than wanted".
Those marks are still used in many places to deny would-be renters a place as they are deemed 'insecure' by the landlords. At that point, it is effectively "unaffordable" as the supply is artificially staggered and the minimum to enter is higher than the market would dictate otherwise. Most could make it work and still have room to spare. This includes countries with safety nets capable of bailing out individuals who mess up.
Might not be the case in Australia, but it certainly exists.
But everything else is definitely not more expensive. If you compare household spend from now to, say, the early 60s, most consumer goods are much cheaper on a relative basis, e.g most people spend a heck of a lot less as a percentage of income for things like food, clothing, appliances, etc. It's primarily housing and service costs (education and health care) that have skyrocketed.
This article for its own purposes talks about teachers but the main even in the country at the moment is the housing cost crisis currently affecting everyone, whether there is actually some special short changing of teachers I don't know but it is not evidenced by the 'can't afford to live in xyz' illustration, because currently you could write some variation of that about a swath of sectors.
Australian home buyers are suffering from negitive gearing. While there are still tax incentives for hoarding houses, this kinda things gonna keep happening.
So there aren't any schools in poor areas? The kids there also commute to posher places for school?
That sounds hard to believe to me, but I also can't believe teachers are the lowest-paid workers in the country. This can only make sense with a very broad definition of "can't afford" - Sydney has of course become a very expensive place to live but that's not only a problem for teachers.
Add to this that the study quoted was confined to New South Wales but the headline makes a claim about 90% of Australian teachers, and it's clear the article is lying to you.
> The study, published recently in The Australian Educational Researcher analyzed quarterly house sales and rental reports in New South Wales (NSW) and found more than 90% of teaching positions across the state—around 50,000 full-time roles—are located in Local Government Areas (LGAs) where housing is unaffordable on a teacher's salary.
I did read the article. It and you did not answer my questions.
I'd like to get a little more context for this cherry picked stat. For example, what percentage of all NSW residents live in these "unaffordable" areas, or what percentage of people are currently paying "unaffordable" amounts for housing.
Another methodology issue (not as bad as conflating NSW and Australia) is they look at the median rent for an area, and compare it to a just-graduated teacher's salary. There's nothing wrong with a fresh college grad not being able to afford the 50th percentile house. How about the 80th percentile? When they go on to talk about "senior educators at the top of the pay scale" the number of roles in unaffordable areas appears to drop from 90% to 4%.
current situation in isolation doesn't mean anything for the future. Statistics based on history and current conditions are given to predict the future. Current population of teachers might have bought house long ago or they might have inherited the house.
Fact remains, 90% of teachers can't afford buying a house with their current salary and market conditions.
Same for the teachers in the Bay Area? I always think this is a great problem for K-12 education. If a teacher has to spend 2 hours to commute to her school, I can't imagine how the teacher would have enough energy to teach kids well. In a great scheme of things, I wonder if kids in the US succeed despite the failures of the US K-12 education. The sad truth is, the majority of the students, millions of them, do need great teachers to push and nurture them in order to grow to their full potential. I can't imagine how exhausted teachers can ever do so.
In contrast, I grew up in China when we had only public education. China did not join the WTO by then, and was quite poor in the current standard. Yet my teachers, for whom I'm forever grateful, painstakingly made sure we understood the fundamentals of science, math, reading, and writing. They designed daily exercises to push our boundaries. They gave timely feedbacks to us (we had at least two 2-hour long exams per subject every week in addition to daily homework, and most of the questions were proof and word problems. Grading them for 50 students in a day or two was not a small feat). I would never push myself as hard as my teachers did, and thanks to them, I could easily thrive in an elite university here and became a TA of CS courses in a sophomore year. I'm sure this is nothing to the elite students here, but I'm not sure if the system of the US can enable the non-elite students like me to achieve such.
If anything, I would love to see my tax dollars go to teachers, increasing their salary by at least 2X. Things like ipad in classroom, compute software this and Epic books that, are really not that essential.
It's well hidden but the article correctly states that paying teachers more does not solve the problem. In a situation with housing scarcity, paying people more, lending them more, will only inflate prices further.
It's a supply problem, and if you think big costly cities will ever add so much supply as to make housing affordable to single income median wages, you're delusional.
AFAIK New South Wales is only one State in Australia so the headline could be better?
But given that public teaching is universal at least in average and bellow areas, doesn't this imply that teachers can only afford to live in ~10% of NSW or are salaries nonuniform such that teachers in an expensive place can afford to live in a place where the local teachers can't afford to live?
You can have both, it just requires so much open zoning and building that you can satisfy international and local demand.
International real estate can be a boom, if someone in China owns an apartment in Vancouver, everyone else is free riding on their property taxes. They are paying for busses they never use, park maintenance on parks they never visit, fire/police/medical emergency services he never calls. This would be great if Vancouver built enough to let everyone who wants to be there be there
Jobs pay as much as it costs to replace you, which is a function of how many people want to do the job and how many people have the skills to do the job.
Many people enjoy doing jobs with meaning, many people enjoy working with kids, and many people enjoy teaching things.
Teaching is like nursing, many people find meaning in it and want to do it, and the skills required aren't too difficult to get. Just as many people likely want to be doctors or university professors, but less can do it, so pay goes up, comparatively.
Or on the other hand, many people can do jobs like working in an oil rig but not many want to. Once you look at jobs like this you understand most of what dictates salaries.
Find something hard to do, that not many people want to do, and you'll always be fine.
If tomorrow all teachers quit because the pay wouldn't be worth it anymore to counterbalance their love of teaching and the feeling of accomplishment of molding the next generation, pay would go up because kids still need to be taught.
That's the other half of the equation: the government is not actually doing what is required to replace the teachers, which would be to raise the wages.
So you get paid the minimum required to replace you OR the maximum the employer is willing to pay before saying "we'll just go without this role being filled", whichever is lower.
If there really is demand for teachers then this shortage will eventually balance out with more expensive education and more teachers. If I'm understanding the argument correctly that is.
It also depends on the minimum competence people will tolerate. There's plenty of competent people who would consider teaching if the compensation was worthwhile. It all depends on how much a country and its voting population care about education and how much more in taxes are they willing to pay to support that.
In librarianship we have the concept of "vocational awe" [0] which also applies to professions such as EMTs, nursing, and teaching. It's a combination of guilt, the idea that bringing money into something 'holy'/moral is crass, and that if you leave you're to blame for the difficulties that your patrons/students/patients experience in the wake of having less access to resources (rather than blaming those who set salaries + staffing levels who are well aware of the correlation between low salaries and poor work conditions and high turnover).
This can contribute to being psychologically hard to leave, but doesn't explain why people get into these professions.
I agree money is only one form of compensation. Some jobs focus on status or honor. But I don't see that in the areas you mentioned.
- nurses do make a lot of money and it's accessible without an incredible academic aptitude
- EMT is almost always a stepping stone job for young people
- a lot of women and moms want to be librarians partly due to flexibility
I mentioned staffing in addition to money because that's how the issue shows up in nursing - nurses are paid a living wage but often expected to deal with horrendous working conditions such as working with far more patients than is safe.
> a lot of women and moms want to be librarians partly due to flexibility
Source? It's not a particularly flexible job, and in my program none of my peers ever mentioned that being why they were here. The concept of vocational awe also comes out of academic librarianship which is a whole other ball game to public librarianship. But maybe my network + program is an outlier so if you have reading on that I'd welcome it!
> EMT is almost always a stepping stone job for young people
And? They're still doing valuable, dangerous work and are literally in charge of keeping people alive. They're also paid barely enough to live on, which is batshit crazy if you consider that chronically stressed people (like those who are living poor) make worse decisions and EMTs are required to make very important decisions on the fly. The only reason it's maintainable is that they have new young people to dazzle.
> But doesn't explain why people get into these professions.
Speaking for librarianship, most people who get into it do so for a few reasons that I've seen(some of them are stupid):
* They like reading and want to be around books and just like libraries. This is a very bad reason to become a librarian and go to graduate school.
* They want to be an academic but can't hack it in/don't want to try to become a professor. Your odds of landing a library position are much better than getting a decent teaching/research job in much of the humanities. So lots of people with grad degrees in things like English and History who realized that they need a career. (This is also a bad reason.)
* They really, really like organizing things. Or are really into niche areas like preservation that can pretty much only be explored professionally in this particular sector. Particularly for people in those interest areas who either have no interest in coding or who went into the profession before there were viable tech career paths to indulge those interests.
* They have several years of library work experience and want to move up the ladder because often you can't get even a basic full time job without the grad degree. This is a version of sunk-cost fallacy (as is the 'wants to be an academic' reason); if you've worked in one field/area for a long time it's hard to consider leaving to do something else.
Yes my experience is with public librarians, not the academic side.
I agree with your post and I'm not clear what our disagreement is. My point is that people are choosing these jobs because they are ok with the tradeoffs. They are being compensated, even if it's not with money. You describe benefits of being a librarian.
For example:
> They're still doing valuable, dangerous work and are literally in charge of keeping people alive
Yes and somehow people still sign up, so it looks like the wages + intangible benefits package is working.
> my program none of my peers ever mentioned that being why they were here
These kinds of life tradeoffs are rarely articulated. In fact I would argue that the savior/sacrificial narrative you describe is likely a polite screen to hide motivations like "I'm afraid of jobs where I can lose my spot if I perform poorly".
Low productivity growth. The productivity of the education sector has been unable to keep up with other competing industries in their communities. Unfortunately we see a similar phenomenon for other labor intensive industries (nursing, public transport, etc).
All foundational to society and more "productive" industries. There seems to be a misalignment.
If industries were personas arguing at a table, Instagram demands pay and threatens to turn off Instagram immediately. Teachers damand pay and can only threaten to destroy society in 50 years. Psychologically, Instagram's threat is a lot more usable, because teachers don't want to pull the trigger on ending society.
In other words, Instagram has a more direct and immediate way of demonstrating value than teachers do.
Australia has exceptional 'productivity' from extracting geological resources, providing exceptional and taxable profits, and requiring few human resources. Low productivity in other areas (e.g., service industries, tech) is more caused by low investment in education than vice versa. Other industries won't find a home in Australia without a capable talent pool, and you can't have that without a well-funded education system.
In any economy there will be sectors that experience rapid growth and sectors that don't. The former will raise salaries, the latter will be impacted, because people have choice. With raising salaries you get raising rents, and this teachers get priced out.
Don't disagree that mining has caused property and rental prices to grow. Other factors in Australia are mandatory superannuation, with large funds buying up real estate, and also generous tax cuts for property investment.
This doesn't explain why Australia hasn't significantly invested in education in the last few decades.
I think in general the costs of low productivity sectors tend to outpace the average which kind of negates additional spending (we see that already, educational spending has grown a lot over the years).
>If the parents actually get more productive they can afford paying
That assumes that the gains in productivity are passed unto the parents in the form of increased income, do you have any data that shows this to be the case?
No. I believe in the last 20-30 years there has been a reallocation of wealth from wage workers to former house owners and stock owners.
But some of the parents gotta be either shareholders or cashed out houseowners?
I just moved from a city where teacher pay has gotten on par with engineers. The only thing needed was outlawing hiring unqualified teachers. Suddenly there was money for teacher salaries.
It didn't solve the housing question for other sectors though ...
(2) They are all basically paid the same (i.e. if you want to pay some teachers more, you have to pay all (in the state) more)
So any time there is a proposal to increase pay for teachers, you have to budget a lot of money. It's rare for there to be such an option each budget year.
in wealthy California, legally mandated education money is relentlessly diverted into obscure and opaque mechanisms, and rarely to teachers. Add multiple layers of political shifting, constant political bickering where promises for benefits much later (retirement) are played at the same time as the first part. Combine with housing policy, lending practices and asset bubbles, and a similar economic result is playing out here, across the entire State.
Budgeting derived from available funding. Person in charge of the institutional coffers may well want to pay teachers more, but alas cannot because this is what they're given to play with.
It really depends on the country, and the particular school district. In the US our problem is cash being syphoned off into "not really education."
Around 10-12k worth of education dollars are spent per year per student at a public school in the US. This money does not educate the children, or even go mostly the teachers' salaries.
The nations that figured out how to get the cash to the people who matter in education are the ones doing it right. Most western countries spend a lot of cash on education; they just spend it in horrifically bad ways.
Because current parents are a minority and the most reliable turnout is among seniors, at least in the US. Benefits of good school are more long term and people aren't very focused upon that in general. Combine that with distrust that given measures will actually help make better schools. (Just look at the generations long distrust of "New Math", "Common Core", etc.)
Several comments about the budgeting issue in public schools, but what about teacher pay in private schools? Is it higher? Are private school teachers unionized? Because absent institutional constraints teacher pay would be more market based. My anecdotal evidence says the market still doesn't highly value traditional teaching, meaning teaching a class in a traditional school.
Even tho a lot of people are in absolute denial about it… (evident by those who downvote) In the US, AU, NZ… Unions… despite having money, getting given more money, rarely does that money go to the teachers. The teachers Union doesn’t do a whole lot to help teachers and mostly works against teachers in their own interests. The unions started off great when they were first introduced but now they are pointless and are crippling the education system.
IMHO, it’s because teachers take it. In our district, administrative costs have expanded through the roof while teacher pay has stagnated. That increases education costs for the community without that money benefiting teachers directly.
What’s worse, IMHO, the teacher unions will then run campaigns for overrides to add additional funding misleading voters into feel good ideas about funding education. When you oppose such an override because the district is a poor steward of public funds you look like you hate the kids or some other BS. I have four kids at our neighborhood school and my wife used to teach in the district (and still subs occasionally). I have a vested interest in ensuring high quality teachers are paid appropriately.
But as mentioned, there are so many who have just accepted that it’s a low paying job and martyred themselves for the good of the community. We’re taking advantage of the people responsible for the future of our communities. And by we, I mean sociopathic school boards and district administrations. They’ll spend money on unnecessary technologies at the drop of a hat but teacher pay increases often require a strike.
I’ve met more than a few teachers who’ve left to join educational supply companies, school administrations, or even unrelated businesses and not known one who went back into the classroom. One of their first comments when describing their transition is how much better the compensation is.
I always wonder what the breakdown of these administrative costs look like. Is it personnel, is it suppliers fleecing school districts, or is it as simple as everything having got more expensive (eg. building maintenance, janitors, transport etc).
You could ask why the people that clean the toilets are paid so little. It is obvious that what they do is important. Dirty toilets are annoying and potentially a health hazard. The truth is that there are many people who can do the job adequately (as defined by societal consensus), so they are paid relatively little. The same goes for teachers.
I believe that the minimum wage should be commensurate with the cost of living in a particular area. Similar to the military's Basic Allowance for Housing (BAH) and Subsistence (BAS) which adapt according to one's location, the minimum wage could be adjusted to reflect the price of local housing and groceries within a 30-minute radius. By doing so, the implications of less desirable local policy decisions would be absorbed by the communities that adopt them.
At present, there is little motivation for change among those profiting from policies that favor commercial or stagnant development over residential expansion. Such policies often compel people to undertake long commutes or inhabit crowded apartments in order to work locally. If businesses had to raise their prices and consumers had to pay more as a result of these policies, communities might be incentivized to establish policies that enable local living.
If the minimum wage was adjusted to reflect local living costs, it could serve as a catalyst for policy change. It would offer a choice: adapt local policies to facilitate affordable living or bear the inconvenience of commuting to other areas for goods and services where wages are in line with living expenses.
There are similar situations throughout the developed world at the moment. Here, we have a huge shortage of housing, and rentals. We are trying to bring in labor to help build more units, however, we do not even have units for the additional labor.
Where's the story here? If you expanded this to all working Australians, you'd still be at about 90%. A long commute is the reality for almost everyone who doesn't work remotely.
Because the article covers a study that focuses on teachers specifically. I'm sure there are studies that show that other non-remote workers in Australia face similar problems.
Family sized houses often require two incomes (or at least one and a half) to afford. The idea that a single person working 190 or so days per year can get one is a bit deceptive. Teachers can work summers or after school to assignment their incomes
If Australian teachers are like others I've encountered, they're getting paid as though they're required to provide 8 hours of work, when really the requirement is more like 10 or 11.
Based on my limited knowledge and biases I obtained over time, I am going to blame Wall street and bankers for such issues. We will see more and even worse situation.
Why bankers and wall street? Because these guys optimize only for making money, demanding infinite revenues and growth, why? To make couple of people even more rich.
> It seems you think economics is zero sum, so if that if these guys win, others must be losing.
Yes, this is my primitive understanding of economics. just like first law of thermodynamics, which states: "energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only altered in form".
I do believe economics is not different. There is a limited set of value in the world created by humans (service, knowledge) and Universe (minerals on Earth, energy coming from Sun and so on). We give price for the value using currency. If currency moves to a limited set of people, it should be taken away from others. When bank hands off mortgage, it expects something in return, which is an interest. To pay interest you need to provide service for someone, more scalable your service is, more you can earn, but not all services are scalable, for example teaching at schools, it doesn't scale, because it has physical constraints, like having a teacher who can engage with kids, whose primary concern is not meeting ends in their private life.
>Yes, this is my primitive understanding of economics. just like first law of thermodynamics, which states: "energy can neither be created nor destroyed, only altered in form".
How do you explain the insane growth in wealth from a few hundred years ago, where we lacked indoor plumbing to today where everyone has a supercomputer in their pocket? Clearly, wealth isn't something that's zero sum, and I'd rather live in a world where I owned 0.0001% of all the wealth and have an iPhone, than one where I owned 0.001% of all the wealth but I'm dying of cholera because I don't have a clean source of water.
To me it looks like we've reached the inflection point. In the past businesses worked to lower costs, so they could reduce the price of their product and sell to more people. Looking at cars, houses, iPhones, nvidia GPUs, etc. everything is getting more expensive. This is likely because businesses must have 10-20% growth every year for infinity (because obviously there are infinite resources and infinite people with infinite money so companies can have infinite growth). However, eventually you'll run out of more people to sell to...so the only way to achieve continued growth for the shareholders is to increase prices.
The problem is that there is now a huge wealth gap. The majority are getting squeezed to death between inflation and insane housing market, childcare, lack of salary increases. So the only way now for these "luxury" companies selling iPhones and cars to achieve their infinite growth for their shareholders is to raise prices to increase margins, targeting the ultra rich faang employees.
We've had iphones in the past, but I wouldn't be surprised if in the near future iPhones become a luxury item that only the rich have.
I expect it mostly has to do with the declining cost of energy. Which, if I remember correctly, has stalled somewhat for a few decades, but may be starting again with solar et al.
I'm pretty sure humanity should be actively targetting / working towards something like "$1 per MWh" if we want to solve most of our current existential crises without forcing things into stasis
Economies are not zero sum in the way that thermodynamics is.
Has a positive amount of wealth been created by humans in the last 50 years? The last 200 years? In the last 2000? It seems obviously true that it has in each of those cases.
If economics were zero sum, wealthy countries would cause a decrease in the standard of living in other countries. Over the last hundred years worldwide basic education and literacy are closing in on practical limits while child mortality has decreased to what’s close to its practical limit. Is that because all countries became economically wealthy or because enough value was added into the world economy that excesses could be used to provide education and sanitation to people regardless of their status in the world?
in other words, when couple of people get ultra rich, some other people should become poor, e.g. you might still earn 100k/year, but you won't be able to afford 1M$ house, because ultra rich is buying all available land and converting it to estate for business to earn even more.
You might think it should stop at some point, but when you stop cycle of growth, wallstreet punishes you with -25% in your stock price and depending on your business model and situation you will layoff more people, in some cases, even if you are profitable company. which gains another +10% to your stock.
This is called "the fixed pie fallacy". There is not a finite amount of dollars to made. There is more money now in the world than there was in 1990 or 1970, and more total value too, adjusted for population.
Wallstreet also has nothing to do with Australian teachers.
Australia is doing what the US is doing too ? Nothing like ensuring your next generation grows up stupid :)
Now I have my tin-foil-hat on:
I almost wonder the top 1%, due to climate change, decided to siphon off even more $ from their government by cutting education to the bone. This extra $ will allow them to create a walled utopia for them when Climate Change destroys most of the earth.
But in the past this has been tried many times before, they need workers (slaves) and eventually this utopia will disintegrate. This time rather quickly. They may be able to buy about 10 to 20 years, but their grandchildren will end up living like the rabble.
So instead of really solving the problem, the top 1% is doubling down and saying "I will be great, climate change will not impact me, so there".
Yes millions of people across multiple countries/continents all secretly colluded to execute this poorly thought out plan that works in a "stars align" scenario.
Or you are just using your worldview narratives to explain events that have simpler explanations in line with evidence ?
No I get that part, I'm just saying you're clearly projecting your worldviews and trying to make reality fit that narrative rather than the other way around.
I don’t think there’s much evidence that it’s a conscious conspiracy. Really, it’s just a consequence of every actor in the system behaving according to their script.
Can Australian teachers be replaced by GPT4 or by a 19-year-old guiding a classroom of students all using GPT4?
Probably.
The value of a teacher in 2023 is lower than ever in history.
To me this article title reads like 90% of Australian chimney sweeps can’t afford to live where they sweep.
Classroom teachers have always held a special place in our societies because of 1) the immense value they provide and 2) the human bonds they build with students.
It’s been a long time since most teachers were able to build bonds with most students. And soon it’ll be a toss-up whether human classroom teachers provide any value at all.
> Can Australian teachers be replaced by GPT4 or by a 19-year-old guiding a classroom of students all using GPT4?
No. The answer here is no. Anyone who has used ChatGPT 3, 3.5 or 4 at all to learn a subject can answer that. Unless you're learning the very basics in field X, GPT - as of right now - cannot help you meaningfully and reliably.
I'm not sure about Australian culture and I think it's a disservice to educators to think GPT can realistically just replace them, but accepting that premise for a moment, in the US, much of the public education system acts as a tax subsidized babysitting service for the labor force. People rely to high degrees that their children are being watched and to some degree taken care of for a large portion of the day by educators while they work. Childcare is absurdly expensive.
So while parents have varying degrees of interest in the quality of education their children receive in terms of what public education can and does, the vast majority of people have a high degree of reliance on that public subsidized childcare portion. For some, education is a side effect, for others it's the entire reason (because they can financially support childcare service or private education).
In the US, I don't see any LLM replacing that function anytime soon. Could public education reshape to become a better optimized child care service where a future system could substitute the education function need? Perhaps. I'm not entirely sure we should want that as a species but all hail optimal capitalism for our overlords. We're not there yet, however.
My sentiment exactly: childcare needn't be that expensive or highly skilled, and therefore teachers needn't be (and generally are not) highly skilled either.
They don't command high salaries because pretty much any responsible adult with minimal skills can do a passable job of what we consider to be passable teaching.
It's not that GPT4 is a great teacher or great teaching aid (although it's not bad). It's that a classroom teacher with 30 students in a room, rattling off that week's geography unit, might as well not be there, except as a run-of-the-mill babysitter.
Is there anything to prevent the pay for our most important and meaningful jobs from approaching zero?
Value (as in profit generating value) and meaning are different things. This explains why meaningful work is not necessarily valuable work. But here's the thing, why aren't value and meaning aligned? Don't we want to value and pay for things we find meaningful? This misalignment seems to be an underlying cause of many problems--the root of all evil even.