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How many fewer human beings exist in the USA today because of legalized abortion?
Perhaps the largest impact is cultural - the denigration of "The Mommy Track."
Real, inflation-adjusted wages go up because of productivity increases. Because of changes in management, capital, and technology, fewer employees producing more products means increases in productivity; historically, most of the increase in productivity flows to employees while a smaller chunk flows to owners (capital). We see this at McDonalds. We see this in bicycle manufacturing shops. We see this in computer manufacturers. We see this among landscapers.
Yet, there are 8 billion people on the planet (which is about 6 billion more than what is sustainable). So, go ahead and vilify women. But, it's the patriarchy that is really to blame.
Incorrect. You are ignoring the value of the defined benefit pension plan, which adds up to $5 Million in value over their career.
Irrelevant.
Irrelevant.
Irrelevant.
"It is offensive". Writing that in the passive voice instead of the active voice (e.g., "I find it offensive") is very weak. Tell us, did your teachers fail to teach you to write in the active voice, or did they cover this and you were not paying attention? Very weak. You'd get a "C" at best.
Regardless, if someone is offended by clear communications, it reflects on the state of their personal snowflakehood. Best to stay out of the sun, ChiGuy. Go back inside & turn on MSNBC.
Incorrect. They are unionized labor hired to implement a set curriculum with few degrees of freedom.
Very weak argument. I added far more value to the economy pursuing an actual profession and engaging in technical innovation - I'm the named inventor on patents incorporated into the product you personally used to type your message. This time you earned a "D."
But thanks for playing.
Cool, obviously you're unable to hold an intelligent debate on the subject. Go ahead and claim everything is irrelevant and attack my writing as if this is a formal medium.
It's good to know you don't care about your kids' education. Hope they do as well as you supposedly did in life. Congrats on your patents all smarty smart. Hope those patents keep you nice and warm at night.
You were wrong about the definition of profession and wrong about teachers not being important. Perhaps the pay can be debated and it seems you aren't open to it, so go ahead and brush off my post with your insulting comments.
P.S. I'm no snowflake or liberal and don't watch MSNBC but I do have a soft spot for humanity as a whole, education being an important right.
Cool, obviously you're unable to hold an intelligent debate on the subject. Go ahead and claim everything is irrelevant and attack my writing as if this is a formal medium.
It's good to know you don't care about your kids' education. Hope they do as well as you supposedly did in life. Congrats on your patents all smarty smart. Hope those patents keep you nice and warm at night.
You were wrong about the definition of profession and wrong about teachers not being important. Perhaps the pay can be debated and it seems you aren't open to it, so go ahead and brush off my post with your insulting comments.
P.S. I'm no snowflake or liberal and don't watch MSNBC but I do have a soft spot for humanity as a whole, education being an important right.
While I don't agree with Mogul. I do think he is trying to say that the market sets the prices. The market values lawyers (who can get you out of trouble) and doctors (who can save your life) more than the local K-12 teacher. Go figure. There's other perks and benefits to teaching (which is why those jobs were always previously filled). I believe it worked well for people with children who had similar work schedules to their children attending school and summer's off (which is not offered in any other profession that I know of). Also, when you work for a place that offers a pension the pay is usually lower because they are funding a pension (so, you are forgoing pay now to collect a pension later (which is a smart move)). The unions will ensure that the wages will keep up with inflation (even if it doesn't happen overnight -- if it takes until the next contract is negotiated).
I personally know people who are in the education arena who were/are teachers. They wanted more and they took principal positions (moved up the ladder). My niece is teaching Engineering at a university; but, is also a Department Head. In Oregon, a lot of teachers, counselors, school district employees retired on more than 100% of their pay. The State went back to sue and lost and they have downgraded their pensions dramatically (they had to because of the pensions they cannot afford to run the current system). It will take decades for those mistakes to fully correct.
My neighbor across the street is renting. I was talking to his wife. He was a high school teacher. But, now they had their third kid and he's now an Actuary. He still needs to pass all the tests and gain more experience; but, he will have a much higher paying career. They are still very young. That's a good move and he corrected his trajectory. I'm sure the skills he picked up teaching will come in handy in the business world as he has to make presentations, etc. I'd imagine he can teach again once all his children are raised and educated.
While I don't agree with Mogul. I do think he is trying to say that the market sets the prices. The market values lawyers (who can get you out of trouble) and doctors (who can save your life) more than the local K-12 teacher. Go figure. There's other perks and benefits to teaching (which is why those jobs were always previously filled). I believe it worked well for people with children who had similar work schedules to their children attending school and summer's off (which is not offered in any other profession that I know of). Also, when you work for a place that offers a pension the pay is usually lower because they are funding a pension (so, you are forgoing pay now to collect a pension later (which is a smart move)). The unions will ensure that the wages will keep up with inflation (even if it doesn't happen overnight -- if it takes until the next contract is negotiated).
My neighbor across the street is renting. I was talking to his wife. He was a high school teacher. But, now they had their third kid and he's now an Actuary. He still needs to pass all the tests and gain more experience; but, he will have a much higher paying career. They are still very young. That's a good move and he corrected his trajectory.
Hey, I appreciate the insult free and well explained argument. You might not think teacher deserve more because of the market demand, perhaps that's true in the past. I do think with the recent waves of inflation you will see public education budgets expand as districts start scaling salary ranges to account for it.
I get their pensions are valuable. I'm not arguing they are severely underpaid or anything but I know teachers making $45k in year 2-3 of teaching. That simply is unacceptable in today's world. Go to school 4 years and barely earn a livable wage. I think the scales need to be adjusted.
I really think pensions need to be eliminated in all government positions. My dads neighbor worked as a Chicago Public Works guy. He made like $180k a year working in water plants and now his pension is worth over $120k. It's crazy to me that teachers can make so much less than other government positions.
Here's the scale for the school district I pay taxes in. I guess this is what their union has negotiated for them. Apparently they value tenure (as if you get better at your job the longer you do it).
You know, hey if teaching doesn't pay well enough then do something that does. Teach somewhere that pays better. That's the American way. With all the unionization of teachers they have done better than they would have (it gave them the best chance). So, since it has been negotiated to infinity; then, it is what it is. Of course they will continue to negotiate COL.
You know, hey if teaching doesn't pay well enough then do something that does. Teach somewhere that pays better. That's the American way. With all the unionization of teachers they have done better than they would have (it gave them the best chance). So, since it has been negotiated to infinity; then, it is what it is. Of course they will continue to negotiate COL.
Your teachers get paid more than teachers in the Chicagoland area. I am not a teacher though, so I am not arguing for my own sake. I am arguing for teachers to make a live-able wage. I'm not sure what the COL is in Beaverton but those salaries look decent enough IMO.
Your teachers get paid more than teachers in the Chicagoland area. I am not a teacher though, so I am not arguing for my own sake. I am arguing for teachers to make a live-able wage. I'm not sure what the COL is in Beaverton but those salaries look decent enough IMO.
Yeah, I just think the pay for teacher's is just bad where you live. In my school district in Arkansas the starting pay is just shy of $48k/yr. If you assume teacher's typically work 10 months out of the year that's the equivalent to about a $58k/yr. If that's 9 months that # jumps up to $64k/yr, split the difference and say they get 2.5 months off a year and their starting salary is roughly $61k/yr. That's not bad for first year out of school with a bachelor's degree. Two teachers would be making over $100k/yr HH income by the time they are 27 in a relatively low cost of living area of the country and they'd have June, July, and parts of May and August off every year.
How many fewer human beings exist in the USA today because of legalized abortion?
Perhaps the largest impact is cultural - the denigration of "The Mommy Track."
Children are an economic liability in late-stage capitalism. The only reason to have them is emotional fulfillment. Micro-economically they are a terrible decision. We have chosen that.
The big issue with fertility rate is that we educate our women too much We'd have more kids if women started having them at 15-16 like most of human history, instead of 30. But having a child in your teens these days is micro-economic destruction. We have set things up where people aren't secure economically until their 30s, if that, and then we wonder why there are fewer kids. We're only giving families 5-10 years to produce them instead of 25.
Decline is religiosity is also a big reason. Abortion and birth control are related to both the religious decline and education piece - they become aware of what their options are.
We could halt the decline with a generous welfare state for families. The Nordics haven't reversed their fertility decline but they have halted it. That is... if you think the economy requires ever-increasing little humans.
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Real, inflation-adjusted wages go up because of productivity increases. Because of changes in management, capital, and technology, fewer employees producing more products means increases in productivity; historically, most of the increase in productivity flows to employees while a smaller chunk flows to owners (capital). We see this at McDonalds. We see this in bicycle manufacturing shops. We see this in computer manufacturers. We see this among landscapers.
What about teachers?
Let's look at productivity of the K-12 public educational system.
In 1960, how many public sector employees were on the payroll to educate, say, 100,000 students?
In 1980?
In 2000?
In 2023?
We don't need google to find the answer. The number of public sector employees on the payroll per 100,000 students is growing like cancer.
There are indeed too many administrators.
However, back then we didn't even try very hard. People have this rosy view of schools in the mid 20th century, but based on my research, they weren't that great. STEM education was much much much worse. Humanities education was better ironically; the students were forced to read more difficult material than today. One thing that surprised me was how hard things like art and music class were. They actually made the students produce some pretty sophisticated stuff, be able to play tough pieces, etc.. Not anything close to today, where the humanities are basically a break from the STEM drilling. The fluency required to pass if you took foreign language was MUCH harder. But again, we weren't trying to educate everyone so only a minority was even getting to that point.
Still. Dropout rates were very much higher than now. In the 1950s, only 20% of black students graduated high school. Only about 55% of white students did. Only about 10% of the population of all students went to college. We weren't even trying. So yeah, they needed fewer teachers because they weren't trying to educate the whole population. We tolerated a lot more literacy and quasi-literacy back then. Look up primary sources from the time from "average" adults. They didn't write well, because they only got to maybe 7th-9th grade.
If you study the typical writing and math skill of the median adult today vs the median adult circa 1950, I guarantee you it's better today, because a lot more adults got 12 years of school vs 7 or 8.
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That is, unlike the private sector, teacher productivity is declining, not improving.
With declining productivity, there is no reason to expect a raise. The opposite is true: we expect compensation of the most unproductive to decline. The economic question is, why hasn't teacher compensation gone down to match the decline in output?
Depending on how you measure productivity, it's way up. Or it's down if we measure it by teachers per 100k or something. But we should also consider students in school per 100k of population, expectations, stuff like that. The teachers are more trained. My great aunt who lived to be 101 was teacher & started in the 1930s. They put her in a classroom after her first year of college... a junior college by the way. They get 3-4 years more of training now from more substantial institutions than she went to. It was literally an office building next to the elementary school.
However, measurement is hard. You start to get into Baumol's Cost Disease... at some point human brains absorb information at a certain speed and there is no way to scale that into higher productivity. Unless you've got some means of injecting information into their brains like The Matrix or something.
Like I said before, at some point what they deserve is irrelevant to the labor market. You're going to have to pay enough to get people to apply and that's that.
Last edited by redguard57; 02-13-2023 at 11:54 AM..
Incorrect. You are ignoring the value of the defined benefit pension plan, which adds up to $5 Million in value over their career.
Oh I WISH it was that much! Since my divorce, I now know precisely what a public pension is worth, since I had to have an actuary calculate it. It's nowhere near $5 million. It's in the neighborhood of 1.5M assuming I collect as soon as I'm eligible and live to my late 80s. It's worth less for K-12 teachers who make lower salaries.
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Irrelevant.
Irrelevant.
Irrelevant.
"It is offensive". Writing that in the passive voice instead of the active voice (e.g., "I find it offensive") is very weak. Tell us, did your teachers fail to teach you to write in the active voice, or did they cover this and you were not paying attention? Very weak. You'd get a "C" at best.
Regardless, if someone is offended by clear communications, it reflects on the state of their personal snowflakehood. Best to stay out of the sun, ChiGuy. Go back inside & turn on MSNBC.
Incorrect. They are unionized labor hired to implement a set curriculum with few degrees of freedom.
Very weak argument. I added far more value to the economy pursuing an actual profession and engaging in technical innovation - I'm the named inventor on patents incorporated into the product you personally used to type your message. This time you earned a "D."
But thanks for playing.
What's becoming irrelevant is what anybody "deserves." Since teaching is one of the job classes that has declined to keep pace with inflation, they're getting their pay cut, and applicant pools are shrinking into nothingness.
My argument is that they just need to keep up with inflation. Not even get a raise. The kind of raise I called for (from ~50k to ~70k), would just be an inflation catch-up. FWIW teaching jobs did pay relatively well during the great recession, and they were stable which was a plus. But they haven't gotten raises since the recession! Where I am starting teachers made about 45k 10 years ago. Now they make 50k.... that's a pay CUT.
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We'd have more kids if women started having them at 15-16 like most of human history, instead of 30. But having a child in your teens these days is micro-economic destruction. We have set things up where people aren't secure economically until their 30s, if that, and then we wonder why there are fewer kids. We're only giving families 5-10 years to produce them instead of 25.
