Member-only story
Thought Experiment: Incentivizing Teachers And Health-And-Welfare Workers With Actual Money
Or, You Know, We Can Just Wait For The Next Lockdown To Clap For Them Again
A few days ago I came across The Anatomy of Your Salary from Philip Joubert, wherein he makes an economic argument for how salaries are determined that seems counterintuitive from a moral perspective, but is quite rational. In it he raises a compelling question about how we incentivize work that we claim to value as a society:
“The best teachers aren’t earning much more than the average. The reason is that schools can’t properly quantify the value that teachers create.”
However complicated it may be to solve problems of this sort, if we look at the salaries it becomes clear very quickly that our healthcare and social welfare workers earn absurdly small amounts that are entirely uncorrelated to how crucial their work is for a functioning society. Some people believe that healthcare and social workers don’t want more money, but I’ve seen enough search results for “teachers strike” and “social workers strike” to be convinced that that’s not entirely true.
Teacher Tracking
The first thought that occurred to me after reading Joubert’s article seems like…
