[Xcelerate]

I find the whole economic system to be quite bizarre. Nobody's salary seems to correlate with much except their skill at getting a high salary. For instance, my sister (elementary education) makes even less than I do as a grad student. The difference is that she wakes up at 5:00 AM and works all day teaching and taking care of little kids until 7:00 PM, whereas I wake up whenever I feel like it, head to a coffee shop and work on research (which is basically a computer game for me), and mix in bike rides and whatever else as I please. The difference in salary will be even more extreme once I get my PhD.

It really doesn't seem fair, and when I think about the vast majority of the world population in other countries, it seems even less fair. I used to have a more conservative stance that if you want to get more, you just have to work harder, but now I've reversed my stance completely: I think it's mostly luck -- where you were born, who you know, what your social skills are, and if you just happen to be in the right place at the right time.

Many jobs seem like they exist solely for the sake of creating more jobs. We have managers of managers of managers. A lot of people don't put a lot of effort into their work (they spend their day browsing the internet), and the ones that do put in an honest effort don't seem to be rewarded for it. The hardest-working employees are rarely promoted into administrative positions. And the best way to increase one's salary is to job hop instead of remaining loyal to one company (http://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2014/06/22/employees...).

I feel like many people have this ingrained notion that you're just "supposed to work" for so many hours a week, and no one is seriously pursuing the goal of creating leisure time (or at least work that's personally enjoyable). We have more than enough technological capability to provide basic survival needs to everyone on the planet, yet we're nowhere close to achieving that goal.

Again, I don't know why it's this way. But it is, and it just seems wrong to me.

[exstudent]

I think there are two separate issues in your comment...

You make more than your sister doing "less" work because knowledge and high level skills are a value multiplier. You may come up with a world changing idea that generates billions of dollars. No kindergarden teacher could achieve that. Pay matches accordingly.

Your second point is that there seems to be a lot of people with useless jobs and I couldn't agree more. We're RAPIDLY approaching the point where most people are employed to do basically nothing of value. How many people's jobs could be replaced by the mythical "script" written in a day by a good dev?

I'm glad to see us get to this point. People should learn and practice useful skills. So as not to cause a violent revolution, I think we do need some form of basic income though. That would also enable creatives to experiment and produce without economic pressure which I think is great. I also don't care if 99% of people mooch off this model as most people are just wasting time at work as it is anyway.

[Sharlin]

It's a horribly short-sighted viewpoint to not take into account the effect teachers (are supposed to) have on whole new generations of people! Teachers raise people who may get billion-dollar ideas in the future, and should be paid accordingly.

[TeMPOraL]

They should, but they aren't and this is the reality.

Capitalism sucks at valuing things that don't give immediate profit. Education is such a thing - it has extreme ROI... 20 years down the line. Which is too long a time and it gets valued less than small changes that will bring in a little bit of money next month.

[MichaelBurge]

How is capitalism the thing valuing teacher's salaries? If referring to the US and public education, aren't they a branch of the government?

And even ignoring that(for example, at private schools), the 'consumer' here is really the parent. The child isn't in a position to choose schools, so it's really about selling to the parent. I imagine it has to be hard to get a sense of any 20-year projected ROI if you can only indirectly measure teaching quality by what your child says and standardized test scores.

[mkr-hn]

> How is capitalism the thing valuing teacher's salaries? If referring to the US and public education, aren't they a branch of the government?

The tax base that funds the schools depends on the whims of capitalism.

[nostrademons]

There's also a bit of a principal-agent problem. The people who make decisions about the educational system are state bureaucrats, teachers, and parents, in roughly that order. The one person who's most affected by it - the kid - has basically zero say in anything.

I suspect that education would be a much higher priority and teachers would be paid much more if children could vote.

[lifeisstillgood]

If children could vote and direct funds then school would rapidly become a cross between a candy-store and a hotel Spa.

[kleiba]

You make more than your sister doing "less" work because knowledge and high level skills are a value multiplier. You may come up with a world changing idea that generates billions of dollars. No kindergarden teacher could achieve that. Pay matches accordingly.

Except this argument doesn't seem to apply globally: I have a good friend over here in Europe who's got a PhD in computer science. He works as a researcher in a renouned university. His sister is not a kindergarden, but elementary school teacher.

She makes (slightly) more money than he does. Her work day starts at 8am and most of the time ends at 2pm. She's got around 10 weeks of vacation per year. She cannot legally get fired if she performs badly.

So in this country, my friends knowledge and high level skill levels certainly weren't a value multiplier when compared to his sister.

Granted, he might be able to get a higher paid job with his background, but that brings us back to the grandparent's original point: your education is not a good predictor for your salary.

[mattrepl]

To play devil's advocate, what if the impact of a teacher inspired a student who eventually came up with a billon-dollar idea?

[vanderZwan]

No need to play devil's advocate, just look at Finland.

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-sc...

[twobits]

"You make more than your sister doing "less" work because knowledge and high level skills are a value multiplier. You may come up with a world changing idea that generates billions of dollars. No kindergarden teacher could achieve that. Pay matches accordingly."

And then the kids grow up, and you are fucked. Do you think the first ever important thing those kids learn, for society, is when they become 20+ and one day they start learning compsci-simulated-quantum-biomolecular-teleportation-of-artificial-intelligence-nanoparticle-drug-dynamofeedback 101? (Yes, if it's not obvious, I just pulled that out of my...)

She gets less, cause the system doesn't care about if the world in totally destroyed 30 years down the road. (Actually that would be great. Opportunity for "growth" and profit.) It only cares about billions yesterday.

[xur17]

Honestly, it's not fair. The whole idea of capitalism is to encourage people to work jobs / obtain certain skills that there is a demand for. If we didn't have enough people to available to be teachers, salaries would start to go up.

The example I see thrown around a lot is plumbing, or garbage collection. Presumably not very many people want to become plumbers, so they get paid accordingly.

[odonnellryan]

I wouldn't say no one is pursuing it. I think it just has yet to become considered as a real possibility for many.

I believe there may be a certain point in the development of society where there has to be a shift from the economic/capitalist model into a model based on human betterment or an effort directly focused on increased capability to sustain and improve our quality of living.

Capitalism worked to get us where we are, but I don't believe it will get us to where we want to be. It improved quality of life and was necessary to develop our current resources. Now we may be able to use those resources to directly model our lives and improve upon their quality.

[wlievens]

But without a personal incentive, nobody will want to do the stuff that isn't fun, or is very risky. How about that?

[pfranz]

You seem to be implying that cash/capitalism is the only incentive. People are still becoming teachers, aid workers, and pursuing the arts even though the financial incentives are terrible. All of those fields aren't all fun and can be risky endeavors.

Let's say we have a basic income. There will probably be less maids so people will have to spend more of their own time cleaning. Your office might have less janitors, part of your job might be to empty trash outside. Maids and janitors will still be around. Their roles would be diminished and they'll just get paid more.

We don't have a purely capitalistic model right now. Whatever we move toward won't be a "pure" anything, either.

[mkr-hn]

Those jobs aren't different from any other. Some people enjoy installing and maintaining septic systems.

[wlievens]

I don't actually mean particular jobs, bur rather that 20% of any job that everyone hates. Almost no job on earth is fun 100% of the time.

But if I were to bail on the part of my job that I don't like, my end users will be pissed off. So I do all of it because I get paid okay.

[odonnellryan]

The personal incentive is that we could all live better lives. We have the means and the capability to directly improve quality of life, rather than gaining capital to trade it for quality of life.