I think there's a big problem with this whole comparison here. You're comparing a career which is almost entirely private-sector (programming) to one which is almost entirely public-sector (teaching). Teachers are mostly employed by local governments, after all, so that profession isn't subject to the market forces which affect private-sector jobs.

The reason teachers aren't paid well isn't because there isn't much demand for them, it's because the local governments choose to pay them poorly, and then they wonder why they can't find enough good teachers.

Companies that don't pay programmers handsomely will soon find themselves without programmers (or with really lousy ones), and then they'll go out of business. This doesn't happen with public schools.

> I don't see the discrepancy as any kind of market failure.

What his story underlines is that teaching young human beings about navigating life is rewarded 3x less than churing out code that fits some business objective.

The market doesn't care about people, it cares about profit. In that system, human life is only important to the degree that it helps market dynamics.

The main problem with teaching is that there's many people who can do it. If you compound the issue with paying teachers $150k a year, not only would the cost of education skyrocket, you would be running into more and more people unemployed but with a degree specifically meant for teaching.

I'm not saying everyone can teach equally. I'm saying most everyone can become qualified to teach. Please don't accuse me of saying teaching is easy. At the very least, a much larger subset can learn to teach than can learn to code.

Many people can learn to program and companies that pay poorly will only be able to hire people who aren't very good and they will go out of business. Finding good teachers is very hard as well but the government will only pay terrible salaries and mostly hire poor teachers. The difference is when the teachers suck and students do poorly, the school doesn't go out of business, they just reduce the budget and it gets worse.

>The difference is when the teachers suck and students do poorly, the school doesn't go out of business, they just reduce the budget and it gets worse.

This is true, but it's become a partisan issue, at least in the U.S, to talk about testing teachers in some way.

I believe a huge problem is finding a way to differentiate a good teacher from a bad teacher if you're not allowed to look at grades/some kind of standardized test. If you can take those into account, as long as a teacher comes into work on time I'm not sure how you could differentiate the good from bad.

An example I like to use is my AP Calc teacher from highschool, who had an average score of 4.7 for her students on the AP test. The average in 2012 was a 2.9 (the year I took it, it seems to be higher now, I can't say to as if they made it easier or if people got better though) [1]. In many school systems though, if your teacher has an average score below the national average, you can't do anything about it.

[1] https://www.totalregistration.net/AP-Exam-Registration-Servi...

Part of the problem with doing that, especially in younger grades, is that so much of it depends on variables outside of a teacher's control. A lot of reading at a young age comes from life experiences. For instance, someone who has never been outside of an inner city is going to have more trouble reading a story about someone sailing on the ocean because they are so far removed from even the most basic plot elements that the things in the story that are actually meant to challenge are not ever gotten to. Additionally, time spent outside of classroom compounds the effectiveness of time spent inside of classroom, but the teacher has no control over that. A teacher can't even control if a student shows up for school or not. Student's performance, especially cross-school comparisons, are nearly worthless and would unfairly punish those that teach at low schools.

I would say you'd have to compare them to similar schools in the area or similar areas in the U.S. Between income range in the surround neighborhoods and population density you should be able to come up with a decent comparison, I would think.

I don't disagree with the letter of your comment, but I take issue with the spirit. Markets are about exchange, and the pricing signal is the aggregate expression of what people value and how scarce it is. Far from being cold and impersonal, they are fully and completely about human values.

OP's wife may place a high intrinsic value on teaching, which serves as a kind of internal subsidy. In that case you'd expect the job to pay less, because more people are being 'subsidized' by their desire to do it.

On the other hand, nobody is burning with desire to be a garbageman. Nobody is a volunteer garbageman, and garbagemen make more money than you might expect (or at least, they did when I was graduating from high school.)

There's a reason glamorous and fun jobs generally don't pay very much. It's not that complicated, and it's not sinister.

How so? Many people (women even moreso than men in my experience) prioritize fulfilling work over higher paying work. This is observable in, for example, people pursuing careers in saturated industries like journalism, art, or acting, as well as going for "more meaningful" startup jobs instead of FANG jobs.

I personally switched from rocket science to tech and then to a FANG so I could get increased compensation and have a chance of catching up to Bay Area housing prices. My compensation increased 3x in the process. Most of my peers wouldn't do that.

Could you elaborate? If not (b) then it seems she would certainly fall into (a).