Property Taxes (Pittsburgh: employment, salary, living)

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by UKyank

then you have no idea of the current reality of the job market for educators.

I never claimed otherwise. And I don't think anyone else here does either, unless someone with actual experience hiring teachers recently has been quiet about it. That's kind of the point of deferring to observable market prices--to avoid opining on prices without a solid basis.

[UKyank]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

I never claimed otherwise. And I don't think anyone else here does either, unless someone with actual experience hiring teachers recently has been quiet about it. That's kind of the point of deferring to observable market prices--to avoid opining on prices without a solid basis.

Thatd be like posting on here in the 80s and saying you gave no idea what the market is for steelworkers because you have no actual experience hiring steel workers and thus to say the market is bad for them is baseless; personal observation be damned.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by user_id

No...this is where you deeply confuse matters. You are oddly mixing micro and macro considerations, you are supplying a half-baked definition of micro level wage negotiation which can in a colloquial sense be deemed "market based". But people are discussing aggregate wages and here a "market wage" is simply where the supply and demand curve intersect.

First, that's all micro.

Second, supply and demand curves are just abstractions without observable data to fill in the details. One of the problems in this discussion is that people are talking a lot about supply issues (although in a very unrealistic way), and almost totally ignoring demand issues. I see no reason to believe anyone here has done all the work necessary to actually calculate a real world demand function for any given school district. And again, these aren't widgets, so that would be an extremely complex task.

The nice thing about observing real world market prices is you don't need to do all that to determine the market price. But if you are going to insist on ignoring that information and calculating what you think the market price should be, there is a lot of work to be done, and no one here opining on that subject is doing that work.

This is just more strangeness, under this way of thinking the labor pool can't in principle seek rents. Any upward shift in labor rates regardless of the reason would be "market based" and therefore not rents....

Nonsense. An economic rent is just a payment above the cost of production (including opportunity costs). Market-based prices can produce economic rents, so to say a price is market-based is not to say it doesn't include an economic rent.

As result, by the time things get bad enough for people to leave the community has been destroyed.

This is getting pretty far off topic, but how is that different from a business failure?

This sure makes me feel better, a public union can extract rents to the point where it destroys a community and there is no more blood to suck. Lovely.

What you are actually saying is that people with taxing authority can misuse their authority to the detriment of a community. Of course that is going to be true with or without public unions.

And in fact lots of entities sell things to local authorities. The mere existence of corporations allows for more rent-seeking behavior than would otherwise be possible, and people with taxing authority may misuse that authority to pay too much to corporations. So obviously corporations should be banned, right?

The more obvious conclusion is that people need to make sure their local taxing authorities are doing their jobs well. You can't just go out and hamstring all their suppliers instead.

Government debt both and the local and state level where high even before the recession.

Cite, please.

Here, by the way, is a different perspective:

Misunderstandings Regarding State Debt, Pensions, and Retiree Health Costs Create Unnecessary Alarm — Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

The upshot is that debt service levels were in normal ranges prior to the recession, and it is really the recession that has caused most of the current fiscal issues.

Unions can force funds from 1.) to 2.)

Again, you are assuming public workers are widgets. Different terms of compensation mean you aren't getting the exact same workers doing the exact same jobs.

Oh, and again corporations can change pricing leading to funds moving from some state projects to others. I really don't see why you are singling out labor, and ignoring all the other inputs state and local governments have to pay for.

and poor candidates (those that would otherwise receive far less in wages) will have the greatest incentives to apply. I have no idea why you think this claim is problematic but probably has to do with why you keep implying I've said things that I haven't.

It is problematic because it makes no sense. Holding constant other terms of employment, at $50K/year for a position you can attract people who could make up to $49.9K/year for a position in another field. At $60K/year for that position you can attract people who could make up to $59.9K/year for a position in another field. You are trying to argue that people making up to $59.9K/year in other fields are going to be less qualified than people making up to $49.9K in other fields, which makes no sense.

The obvious logical error is when you claim poor candidates have the greatest incentives to apply. That makes no sense--poor and good candidates alike have the same incentive to apply: more money. The difference is that when you up the salary offer, the new candidates you get are better on average than the candidates you would get only at the lower salary.

And none of this has anything to do with the wage-setting mechanism.

Higher wages only result in higher quality candidates if there is a hiring process that seeks to maximize value (whoever that is defined for the particular job).

Better candidates will be attracted by the higher wage alone, even if the hiring process is no more than random. But in any event, school districts do indeed typically seek to hire the best candidates they can attract.

umm...yeah too bad I never said such a thing huh?

Oh but you are. You may not understand that yourself, but the way you are trying to model these markets requires the assumption that teachers are interchangeable. If you instead (correctly) observe these are differentiated markets, then you need a much more sophisticated sort of model than the ones you are pushing.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by UKyank

Thatd be like posting on here in the 80s and saying you gave no idea what the market is for steelworkers because you have no actual experience hiring steel workers and thus to say the market is bad for them is baseless; personal observation be damned.

I don't know what you mean by the phrase "the market is bad for them".

To make this a proper analogy, you would have to be talking about some market-based price, presumably wages. Interestingly, even as the number of steel industry jobs was declining in that era, along with total output, productivity was increasing, and in fact real wages actually increased too:

Real Wage Rate And Productivity Relationship In The Declining U.S. Steel Industry | Nwaokoro | International Business & Economics Research Journal (IBER)

That is actually a good example of how you have to be careful about the conclusions you draw with respect to wages from something like the existence of an apparent oversupply of labor. Declining output and increased productivity meant a bunch of people were going to lose their jobs no matter what the wage. But it didn't mean the remaining jobs would be at lower wages, and in fact the opposite occurred.

Edit: By the way, I think this is a fitting end to this conversation, or at least my participation in it. The fact that real wage rates increased during the steel bust is admittedly counter-intuitive, and thus that is an excellent example of why we shouldn't just rely on intuition to determine appropriate wage rates.

[UKyank]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

I don't know what you mean by the phrase "the market is bad for them".

To make this a proper analogy, you would have to be talking about some market-based price, presumably wages. Interestingly, even as the number of steel industry jobs was declining in that era, along with total output, productivity was increasing, and in fact real wages actually increased too:

I wasn't making any analogy about wages, I was making an analogy that one can observe things & be aware of their surroundings without playing ignorant to what is occurring if it fits ones argument.....ie one wouldht need be in any specialized hiring position to see that it was a bad time to be looking for work in the steel industry in the 80s & any open position was highly coveted just as today, those in the education field are having a hard time finding employment & apply in mass to any open teaching job; to say otherwise is to put blinders on to the real world in order to support a particular viewpoint

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by UKyank

I wasn't making any analogy about wages, I was making an analogy that one can observe things & be aware of their surroundings without playing ignorant to what is occurring if it fits ones argument.....ie one wouldht need be in any specialized hiring position to see that it was a bad time to be looking for work in the steel industry in the 80s & any open position was highly coveted just as today, those in the education field are having a hard time finding employment & apply in mass to any open teaching job; to say otherwise is to put blinders on to the real world in order to support a particular viewpoint

But what you claim to be analogous circumstances didn't lead to lower wages in the steel industry. Counterintuitively, it led to higher wages. And probably someone doing hiring for the steel industry in that period could have explained that counterintuitive result.

And that's my point--it is one thing to make casual observation like "there are a lot of people looking for teaching jobs in Pittsburgh", and another to develop an actual economic model from which you could reliably determine that teacher wages in Pittsburgh should be lower. These issues are way too complex to allow for such an inference from that observation alone, because that observation is not inconsistent with wages being at an efficient level (or, for that matter, with wages being artificially low).

Someone who was in an actual hiring position might have some insight to share, however. But this sort of armchair theorizing about wages in the absence of many of the sorts of information you would actually need to develop a reliable economic model (and such models are often illusive even under the best of circumstances) really has no value. Seriously.

[UKyank]

& if everything is completely market based as it stands now i guess someone duped those teachers into joining a union then & wasting money on union dues.

[squarian]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

We just need marginalize the Southern Strategy decisively and finally, but time and demographic changes are on our side.

In my view, we lost our best chance to marginalize the Southern Strategy in 1861, when that other president from Illinois made the wrong call, alas.

[gg]

Originally Posted by BrianTH

I never claimed otherwise. And I don't think anyone else here does either, unless someone with actual experience hiring teachers recently has been quiet about it. That's kind of the point of deferring to observable market prices--to avoid opining on prices without a solid basis.

You would have to be living under a rock not to know there are a ton of teachers looking for work in Allegheny County. You certainly don't need to be on a school board or in education to know that. Just ask any grade from Duquesne in education. Most have to teach down south.

Speaking of which isn't ALL bad. Places like Collier and Sarasota County pay pretty well down in Florida. You can blanked the entire south.

[BrianTH]

Originally Posted by UKyank

& if everything is completely market based as it stands now i guess someone duped those teachers into joining a union then & wasting money on union dues.

Ugh. Why is it so hard to grasp that collective bargaining can change the terms of contracts without that meaning the resulting terms are non market-based?

A corporation which owns a chain of stores buys some common supplies for its chain. It negotiates a lower price for those supplies than each store could have gotten if it had submitted a separate purchase order. Does this mean the prices the corporation got for its supplies were not market-based?

Corporations, among other things, allow for collective bargaining. So do unions. People get that corporations still participate in markets and get market prices, despite their collective bargaining. But some people just can't seem to grasp that the same thing applies to unions.

Oh well.