12 ms·
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 cri
by Buttons840 3y ago
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.
- gruez 3y ago>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!"
- Waterluvian 3y agoYeah. 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.
- anothernewdude 3y agoEconomic 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.
- pauldenton 3y agoYes, but there's no evidence that throwing more money at the problem results in better outcomes https://youtu.be/f0JorXgqxiU 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
- ipaddr 3y agoBecause parents and social expectations play a greater role than money
- coredog64 3y agoThere'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?
- nemo44x 3y agoIt’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.
- thfuran 3y ago>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?" That is not the implied problem.
- gruez 3y agoWhat's the implied problem then? If there's no problem of pay going to zero, why fret about it going to zero?
- rocketbop 3y agoTeachers 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.
- smugma 3y agoBy this argument, teachers should be paid more. There are teacher shortages across the US and the article touches on shortages in Oz. https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/05/12/free-training-teacher-shortage-apprenticeship/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/05/12/free-tra...
- renewiltord 3y agoInteresting 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.
- mjhay 3y agoPeople thinking they understand economics because they took a 101 class is a major problem. Case in point: this post.
- ModernMech 3y ago> 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?
- swayvil 3y agoWe are cerebral mammals. The crown of creation. But our society forces us to imitate the lowest creatures : Viruses. Insects. Funny.
- mrangle 3y agoThe intellect(God-adjacent) / animal dichotomy within humans and their condition is a an old embedded quandry of theology.
- ModernMech 3y agoImo, 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.
- pauldenton 3y agoAnd what about in non capitalist systems. How is the software industry in North Korea?
- s1artibartfast 3y agoI live in a capitalist country, and still have sex with my wife despite nobody paying me. Capitalism is a model and framework for economic interaction. It says nothing about what people enjoy and find meaningful.
- ModernMech 3y agoI’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.
- swayvil 3y agoOne argument I've heard is that you're being paid in meaningfulness (in addition to the money). And that's why it works out (ethically speaking).
- gonzo41 3y agoLet's see how paying the rent with vibes works out eh.
- mrangle 3y agoThat'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".
- dionidium 3y ago> 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.)
- p0pcult 3y ago[flagged]
- generalizations 3y agoGive it 5 years, and we'll have GPT-edu providing personalized tutoring at scale. Then all you need is someone to keep the kids in line. Pay extra for the version trained on the classics.
- lr4444lr 3y agoAnd have it teach you AI generated lessons on Plato's Cave? Oh, the irony...
- bartwe 3y agoSociety doesn't want personalized tutoring, they want cultural harmonization and daycare so the parents can work and society can remain stable.
- exit 3y agoupvoted but really, society has an extraordinary array of often incoherent desires we're trapped in an excruciating process of experiencing these desires assert and resolve themselves
- vasco 3y agoHard, 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.
- acover 3y agoHard, disgusting, dangerous jobs still often pay poorly. Good paying jobs have high barriers to entry and sufficient demand for the services provided.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- hn_throwaway_99 3y agoLet'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.
- cultofmetatron 3y ago> 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"
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoThe 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.
- nly 3y agoI think the word 'fulfilling' is more fitting than 'meaningful', and it's very subjective. Some garbagemen genuinely take pride in their work.
- lr4444lr 3y agoMeaningful to whom? The worker, the employer, or the consumer?
- resonious 3y agoI'm pretty sure the parent is talking about meaningful to the worker.
- hypertele-Xii 3y agoAll of the above?
- psychlops 3y agoMy guess is meaningful to the person since there isn't really a universal definition of meaningful.
- arcbyte 3y agoMoral 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.
- _uhtu 3y ago[flagged]
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- contingencies 3y agoNo. 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)
- arcbyte 3y agoHalf 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.
- contingencies 3y agoThat's the problem with vague subjective statements: shifting goalposts in conversation. Being "right" is less important than saying something useful and verifiable.
- sdwr 3y agoValue is instant - a dollar in the hand. Meaning is delayed - shaping thr future. Choosing meaning over value is an investment.
- elbigbad 3y agoThis is unnecessarily reductive, but it probably sounded good in your head or if someone only considers it for a few seconds before thinking about it. Of course meaning can be instant, and value can be delayed.
- sdwr 3y agoOpen your brain-hole for a second. 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.
- jemmyw 3y agoA bird in the hand is worth two in the bush. A dollar in your hand now can be invested giving you enough money in the future to find personal meaning.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoIsn’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?
- bell-cot 3y ago> Isn’t supply and demand the right solution... 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.
- s1artibartfast 3y agoeither 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.
- seanmcdirmid 3y agoAs 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.
- MagicMoonlight 3y agoThe 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.
- seanmcdirmid 3y ago
- jongjong 3y agoYes, 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.
- qeternity 3y ago> But I guess the top 1% don't want to live among happy people. > And the masses are just too dumb to even trust their own senses. Alright the 1%ers are evil and the other 99% are dumb. But you...you have all the answers?
- jongjong 3y agoI 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.
- qeternity 3y ago> I have some answers because I've faced many of the problems. You haven't actually answered anything. You just blurted out things like "manipulation" and "exploitable".
- softsound 3y agoIt'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.
- yobbo 3y ago
- diurnalist 3y agoDavid 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." [1]: https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-thomas-frank-the-more-your-job-helps-others-the-less-you-get-paid https://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/david-graeber-and-th...
- antiterra 3y agoThis sort of Calvinistic ideal of work as an inherent virtue is what was behind the “Arbeit macht frei” slogans on archways at concentration camps.
- CP3f6kMA 3y agoNo, I think Nazism was behind those words.
- antiterra 3y agoIt 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” - historian Otto Friedrich
- byby 3y agoNo 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.
- romeros 3y agoIt 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- pcurve 3y ago"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.
- Kinrany 3y ago> Is there anything to prevent the pay for our most important and meaningful jobs from approaching zero? Raise requirements so that only top X% are allowed to do the job. Balance X so that it's the buyer's market, but barely.
- pharmakom 3y agoFind meaningful work that requires rare skills that you possess. Hopefully you have some! Math teachers are paid more than other teachers in many places, to give a real example.
- missedthecue 3y agoI 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.