What is wrong with our society today? Can we really claim to value teachers when their salary is low compared to professional athletes? I mean everyone has heard the claim that so few teachers can get by on a teacher’s salary. As someone who is a public school teacher, I’d sure like to earn more money (and would gladly accept any you’d want to bless me with). What can we make of these claims?
First, we need to understand some basic economics before discussing why teachers get paid so little compared to professional athletes. To do so, I’d like to start with a question that will help us see a parallel in what economists describe as the water-diamond paradox. Are diamonds more valuable than water? Value seems pretty subjective here. This points to the economic reality that the value of goods is subjective to a given situation.
This is not a moral analysis. We are not saying what we ought to value like we do in ethics. This is simply referring to economic value. We can find the same object that has great value for one person has little value to another. For example, I still remember purchasing my set of Harvard Classics at a garage sale for $4. These were an incredible treasure (50 volumes that included some of the greatest works ever written) to me, but not to the seller. He wondered why anyone would want to read these books now that we have the internet.
When people exchange goods, both value the thing they are trading for more highly than the thing they are giving away. They wouldn’t trade if it weren’t so. Due to the different subjective economic values, both parties feel that the trade is a win-win.
Let’s get back to the water-diamond paradox. Consider that in America, if most of us were offered a 2 liter bottle of water or a 2 liter bottle of diamonds, we would choose the diamonds in a heartbeat. Don’t try to propose to your girl with a bottle of water instead of ring fellas arguing that she needs the water to live (even if the water boy himself gives it to you).
Why would we choose diamonds when we need water to live? Obviously water is more valuable in some way, isn’t it? The insight here that people have is that water is plentiful to us. Not many feet from me I have access to as much water as I can drink. It is so cheap that it is as close to free as we can get. The same can’t be said of diamonds. These jewels are expensive and difficult to access. They are valued much more highly because of their scarcity compared to water. No one denies that water is valuable to live. If the situation was that we were dying of thirst in the desert with no hope of survival with the same offer, we’d choose the water.
How does this relate to teachers and professional athletes? In my state of North Carolina, as of 2015, there were 121,070 teachers in the public schools.[1] There were even more who were graduating and licensed who weren’t teaching. Contrast this number with the 1696 players in the NFL, or 450 players in the NBA. These are the best athletes for their respective positions in the world. There is a scarcity of enormous, athletic, fast, muscular men that can perform at the level of these people. It is very similar with other professional sports. Very few people in the entire world can be great at a given sport, and especially great enough that people will pay to come to see them perform. Teachers, on the other hand, are plentiful. Both scarcity and value for their respective skills accounts for the differences in pay.
Contrast the two groups in the following situation. What would be the impact in North Carolina of 100 random teachers quitting as compared with 100 NBA players? People would barely notice the impact of the teachers, but the NBA would take much longer to recover with their lost talent.
Everyone knows that teachers as an entire group are more important for our society. But this is not a factor that determines pay. In reality there is scarcity that we have to account for in the analysis along with supply and demand. The supply of teachers is plenty and there is a scarcity of professional athletes that have a certain skill set. There are professional athletes in other sports (not the NBA or NFL) that are not paid as much as they pay teachers. For example, professional lacrosse players make between $10,000 and $25,000 per year.
I teach both ethics and economics. These distinctions are
important to help us understand the nature of trade and value. Economic value
is not the same as moral value. In
analyzing trade, the economic value of what is exchanged is what is weighed. We
can also ask the additional question as to whether a particular good or service
ought to be valued. This is a moral assessment that we make as humans. It is
different from the economic analysis but no less important, even if it is
distinct. The economic analysis makes sense of why we pay pro athletes more
than we pay teachers. It is not immoral to pay each worker what they are worth.
In any industry if you pay someone too little, you risk losing them to another
area where they can be compensated more. If any who are reading this feels inclined to
try to bridge the gap between the pay between these teachers and pro athletes,
I volunteer myself to receive donations (all proceeds will go to help feed hungry
children … I have 5).
[1] This is according to the data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics for 2015.
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