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It is wrong to compare Tom Brady to teachers in general. Instead you should compare athletes in general to teachers in general. Or compare best in class athlete

It is wrong to compare Tom Brady to teachers in general. Instead you should compare athletes in general to teachers in general. Or compare best in class athletes to best in class teachers. The general comparison would compare minor league baseball or local club soccer players to your kids kindergarten teacher. You might find that the teacher comes out on top. The best in class comparison is harder. There are only 32? Nfl teams therefore there is enormous competition for the 32 best quarterbacks (maybe more including backups). If you are the #200 quarterback on the planet no one cares. Those selection dynamics don't happen for teachers. There might be some elite tutors who are highly sought out by wealthy parents, but not with the same intensity as quarterbacks. This is compounded by the fact that sports skill is more easily measured than teaching skill. We might debate if Tom Brady is better than Peyton Manning, but it is obvious both are in the top ten in the world. Not so with teachers. Some are clearly better, but the clarity of ranking you can get with sports performance is impossible is any measure of teaching performance.

platz 10y ago
Where are the best in class teachers? Are they hiding among the teachers in general? If they can't be identified, there is no effective & material differentiation (read: no justification for higher compensation) among them vs the less skilled. Are you saying that the best teachers, in principle, could be measured, but we haven't developed the methods to do so (to be sure, a real possibility)? Or are they simply 'better' a-priori/intrinsically regardless if we can measure it or not? The best in class athletes to best in class teachers comparison either fails or finds athletes winning flat out.
- quantumhobbit 10y ago
  I'm saying that it is harder to measure and that the measurement is inherently noisier for teachers. We measure teachers by how their students perform on standardized tests, which has all sorts of problems. The more important factor is the value placed on differential performance. A 10% difference in teacher performance is lost in the noise. It likely wouldn't mean more money even if it could be measured easily. Whereas a 10% difference in football might mean being #1 in the draft versus going undrafted.
- drostie 10y ago
  Probably the most substantial difference is iteration. A footballer gets many games per year with many moments per game to potentially shine or fail publicly, with stats that can be evaluated year after year. Your success as a teacher can somewhat be evaluated via testing, but that seldom tracks something close to what you're really supposed to be doing: making a difference in your kids' lives. At best that's an evaluation that has to be made by the now-grown child themselves, several years after the interactions which occurred.
- eanzenberg 10y ago
  Private schools, international schools (if multi-lingual), private tutoring.
drostie 10y ago
Yeah, I would have expected that a domain called "Cafe Hayek" and a post title of "Thinking at the Margin: It's Revolutionary" would have noticed that it's not a supply-side surplus that drives down these wages, but a complex interaction of how the demand-side works. First off, we have the layers of oligopolization, like you've said: carefully marketed and individuated products for sports, film, and music ensure that there's a substantial profit margin there. It's not that there aren't indie films or small sports teams; it's that these companies have convinced people that this is their team and that their identity is mixed in with it, just the way that my girlfriend drinks Diet Coke and not pop. Teaching is simultaneously much more cutthroat, with tons of schools that are constantly shifting composition and competing for the same slice of some dearth of public funds which first gets siphoned off by the occasionally-corrupt bureaucrats at the top, superintendents and such, who don't have nearly the accountability that the teachers do. Then there is a competition among the teachers, ameliorated somewhat by unions, but there is also a competition between the unions too. All of this ensures that there's money to spare for the pop cultures that's not there for the educational infrastructure. UNTIL... you get to colleges, where there are some colleges which have distinct identities; I still name-drop my undergraduate work at Cornell rather than my Master's at the TU Delft, even though the latter is a much greater achievement. There's a bit more pie around for the professors, and they enjoy much more cushy arrangements like tenure. If you average over athletes in general, athletes get paid crap. Most of them are teenagers playing in exchange for being taken out for pizza afterwards; then there are adult amateurs and college-level play... You take the typical inner-city basketball player and evaluate his chances of making it to stardom, you're going to be talking about winning the lottery. Even if he has big dreams. Same with actors. But what you're actually seeing in these celebrities is a carefully-played oligopoly causing a great demand for a scarce product, and the scarcity drives these commitments to finding the best-of-the-best that allows stars to leverage that monopoly that all of us have in a free society, our monopoly on our own labor.
- Domenic_S 10y ago
  Did you just say that teaching is much more cutthroat than professional sports, music, and film? I'm trying to imagine the aspiring teaching doing late-night lectures in smoky bars for free, or teaching at the local teacher's club (again for free) so that one day they might reach their dream of being a professional teacher. One day teaching might be cutthroat if we can ever figure out how to create some competition, but the only throat cutting that's happening is over internal politics, which is table stakes for any career worth pursuing.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
tpeo 10y ago
Exactly. It doesn't make sense to compare the top individual of one ability's distribution to the average individual of another. There's a world of difference between a top football player and the average football player. I'd expect ability to be distributed along a power law, just like wages are.

platz 10y ago

Where are the best in class teachers? Are they hiding among the teachers in general? If they can't be identified, there is no effective & material differentiation (read: no justification for higher compensation) among them vs the less skilled. Are you saying that the best teachers, in principle, could be measured, but we haven't developed the methods to do so (to be sure, a real possibility)? Or are they simply 'better' a-priori/intrinsically regardless if we can measure it or not? The best in class athletes to best in class teachers comparison either fails or finds athletes winning flat out.

quantumhobbit 10y ago
I'm saying that it is harder to measure and that the measurement is inherently noisier for teachers. We measure teachers by how their students perform on standardized tests, which has all sorts of problems. The more important factor is the value placed on differential performance. A 10% difference in teacher performance is lost in the noise. It likely wouldn't mean more money even if it could be measured easily. Whereas a 10% difference in football might mean being #1 in the draft versus going undrafted.
drostie 10y ago
Probably the most substantial difference is iteration. A footballer gets many games per year with many moments per game to potentially shine or fail publicly, with stats that can be evaluated year after year. Your success as a teacher can somewhat be evaluated via testing, but that seldom tracks something close to what you're really supposed to be doing: making a difference in your kids' lives. At best that's an evaluation that has to be made by the now-grown child themselves, several years after the interactions which occurred.
eanzenberg 10y ago
Private schools, international schools (if multi-lingual), private tutoring.

drostie 10y ago

Yeah, I would have expected that a domain called "Cafe Hayek" and a post title of "Thinking at the Margin: It's Revolutionary" would have noticed that it's not a supply-side surplus that drives down these wages, but a complex interaction of how the demand-side works. First off, we have the layers of oligopolization, like you've said: carefully marketed and individuated products for sports, film, and music ensure that there's a substantial profit margin there. It's not that there aren't indie films or small sports teams; it's that these companies have convinced people that this is their team and that their identity is mixed in with it, just the way that my girlfriend drinks Diet Coke and not pop. Teaching is simultaneously much more cutthroat, with tons of schools that are constantly shifting composition and competing for the same slice of some dearth of public funds which first gets siphoned off by the occasionally-corrupt bureaucrats at the top, superintendents and such, who don't have nearly the accountability that the teachers do. Then there is a competition among the teachers, ameliorated somewhat by unions, but there is also a competition between the unions too. All of this ensures that there's money to spare for the pop cultures that's not there for the educational infrastructure. UNTIL... you get to colleges, where there are some colleges which have distinct identities; I still name-drop my undergraduate work at Cornell rather than my Master's at the TU Delft, even though the latter is a much greater achievement. There's a bit more pie around for the professors, and they enjoy much more cushy arrangements like tenure. If you average over athletes in general, athletes get paid crap. Most of them are teenagers playing in exchange for being taken out for pizza afterwards; then there are adult amateurs and college-level play... You take the typical inner-city basketball player and evaluate his chances of making it to stardom, you're going to be talking about winning the lottery. Even if he has big dreams. Same with actors. But what you're actually seeing in these celebrities is a carefully-played oligopoly causing a great demand for a scarce product, and the scarcity drives these commitments to finding the best-of-the-best that allows stars to leverage that monopoly that all of us have in a free society, our monopoly on our own labor.

Domenic_S 10y ago
Did you just say that teaching is much more cutthroat than professional sports, music, and film? I'm trying to imagine the aspiring teaching doing late-night lectures in smoky bars for free, or teaching at the local teacher's club (again for free) so that one day they might reach their dream of being a professional teacher. One day teaching might be cutthroat if we can ever figure out how to create some competition, but the only throat cutting that's happening is over internal politics, which is table stakes for any career worth pursuing.

deleted 10y ago

[deleted]

tpeo 10y ago

Exactly. It doesn't make sense to compare the top individual of one ability's distribution to the average individual of another. There's a world of difference between a top football player and the average football player. I'd expect ability to be distributed along a power law, just like wages are.