[wyldfire]

This thread seems to have few comments on the article and several on the title. It's not an HN survey, it's an article regarding a research paper [1].

IMO -- this kind of data could/should benefit teachers and researchers who want to argue that their benefit to society isn't reflected in the existing high school/undergrad/graduate metrics. Instead of paying teachers/researchers the wage that reflects an equilibrium between available supply and job demand, maybe we could offer something that offsets their (positive) externality. I suppose it only makes sense for public schools since private entities aren't focused on things like this. But there's a lot of debate over public school funding and this seems like a great input to that debate.

[1] http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1324424

[raleighm]

Perhaps, but teachers not capturing enough of the economic value of their teaching shouldn't be the core of an argument to pay teachers more.

This is an impoverished view of the value of education (from the paper you linked): "We calculate the social product of teaching as the impact of an additional year of schooling on aggregate earnings of all workers in the economy. The spillover from teaching is then this social product less the annual earnings of all teachers."

[ignostic]

But I so badly wanted to share my opinion on /r/askhn rehashing commonly-held beliefs..