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> because labor gets allocated to the most economically beneficial sectors naturally through fluctuations in wages. In a perfect market economy, yes. In an imp

> because labor gets allocated to the most economically beneficial sectors naturally through fluctuations in wages. In a perfect market economy, yes. In an imperfect economy, where the value of each teacher is hard to measure, and where teachers cannot capture the full value of their work (e.g. a lifechanging middle school teacher can't charge much more than a normal teacher) this isn't true. > Imagine, for example, that the US allowed unlimited migration from China, India etc for engineer positions... wage situation would be much different. This is really not clear. First of all, as software engineering can be done remotely, there is already a fair level of global competition. Second, migration doesn't always decrease wages (see Mariel boatlift for a counterexample). And even with open borders I don't think the current top 10pct of SWEs would be paid more than 20% less. > But yeah, generally in a free market wages will be set "fairly". Again, assuming that the market is efficient, which it probably isn't.

adam_arthur 5y ago
You're right that the impact of teachers is hard to measure. But we can ask whether educational outcomes would improve by paying teachers more... and my feeling is that the answer is largely no. Most of educational outcome is cultural/determined by the student and their peers rather than the teacher. An interesting experiment would be running two cohorts of students through the same school, with same curriculum but different set of teachers. And paying one set of teachers more than the other and measuring long term outcomes. I would be interested in seeing the results of this experiment. There was already something like this done as a result of a New Jersey lawsuit, but I would have to vet whether it impacted pay of the teachers. In that case there was no improvement in educational outcomes, despite greatly increased funding for the schools. Yes, software could have always been done remotely. But it largely hasn't... and timezones become problematic. Show me where FAANG companies are hiring remote workers en masse for US based teams? Maybe it's happening, but I certainly haven't seen any evidence of that. I worked for a company that primarily hired on H1B, and hiring was a lot easier when pulling people from Europe/India/China due to lower comp expectations. These people were paid the same as everybody else/native US people, but just culturally were less comp sensitive. But H1Bs are highly limited in quantity, of course. Why suggest the economy is inefficient? In areas where the market has little intervention, it's largely efficient. Though I agree there are areas where there actually needs to be more government intervention to encourage a competitive market. Competitive markets are more important than free markets for a societally beneficial outcome. One example: competitive markets require that information is freely available. Companies can profit by hiding information which disadvantages consumers (e.g. cost of healthcare procedures, cost of enterprise software etc... relies on information asymmetry to enhance margins).

adam_arthur 5y ago

You're right that the impact of teachers is hard to measure. But we can ask whether educational outcomes would improve by paying teachers more... and my feeling is that the answer is largely no. Most of educational outcome is cultural/determined by the student and their peers rather than the teacher. An interesting experiment would be running two cohorts of students through the same school, with same curriculum but different set of teachers. And paying one set of teachers more than the other and measuring long term outcomes. I would be interested in seeing the results of this experiment. There was already something like this done as a result of a New Jersey lawsuit, but I would have to vet whether it impacted pay of the teachers. In that case there was no improvement in educational outcomes, despite greatly increased funding for the schools. Yes, software could have always been done remotely. But it largely hasn't... and timezones become problematic. Show me where FAANG companies are hiring remote workers en masse for US based teams? Maybe it's happening, but I certainly haven't seen any evidence of that. I worked for a company that primarily hired on H1B, and hiring was a lot easier when pulling people from Europe/India/China due to lower comp expectations. These people were paid the same as everybody else/native US people, but just culturally were less comp sensitive. But H1Bs are highly limited in quantity, of course. Why suggest the economy is inefficient? In areas where the market has little intervention, it's largely efficient. Though I agree there are areas where there actually needs to be more government intervention to encourage a competitive market. Competitive markets are more important than free markets for a societally beneficial outcome. One example: competitive markets require that information is freely available. Companies can profit by hiding information which disadvantages consumers (e.g. cost of healthcare procedures, cost of enterprise software etc... relies on information asymmetry to enhance margins).