It's not so much the jobs on the bottom end that would be vacant, there will always be people who don't want complicated work. It's the highly skilled jobs that take years of sacrifice to be able to do, the ones that are incredibly stressful and that force you to work longer hours with more responsibility that you will need to force people to do.

The difference is that you will be holding your best and brightest at the equivalent of knifepoint, demanding that they sacrifice more then their neighbors 'for the good of the country'.

Exactly. I would not do those jobs... I would just fail the test on purpose.

And in such a way the system would be self selecting :P

There are enough people who enjoy the challenge and respect that comes with management who would take on that role even if reward was not measured primarily through money. I know plenty of people who take that experience and training and all that hard work and use it to get a job doing something very important and stressful within an organisation like the Refugee Council. I also know of people who have chose n a lesser paid position because the job held more prestige than a similar, better paid job with a less respected company. And people who have chosen to take their skills and training and use it to bring on a worthy company (such as a local theatre company).

There are many co operatives operating in the UK (though not as many as in Germany: their company law is much more adaptive for co-operatives and mutuals) where, though there is a differantial in wages between different staff levels, those levels are set by the members as a whole. Often people will work in such co-operatives for significantly less than they would get in an ordinary firm.

Lots of people do jobs which are paid less than they could potentially earn elsewhere. Those who don't feel like working so hard for so little would preumably fail the test on purpose (rk) and do lesser jobs instead.

Actually, I would just leave such a place and go where people appreciate excellence.
Which is what happens to socialist nations, those who excel, the artists and inventors leave.

Again you are equating appreciation with financial reward. I would suggest that not everyone shares that definition of appreciation.

.

I do not feel that way. If that had been the case I would have chosen jobs/careers differently. I turned down a job with my family that would have made me quite rich. Even causing some hard feelings for a few years.
I did not want the job. The money was not even a consideration.
The two, the work and what you get for it, are not equivelent... but one must feel that the two are fairly connected.

Again though what constitutes a fair connection depends on your cultural relationship with currency.

Most cultures value it.



and people within those cultures exchange it for goods and services

Agreed Bruce. But this whole discussion of paying management the same as wokers began with a hypothetical society. I was suggesting that in such a hypothetical society the relationship between currency and culture would be different. In a culture that does measure value through currency obviously people want remuneration commensurate with their skills and workload.

Rk said he would leave such a culture and go where he is appreciated. I was saying that if he'd been born into the hypothetical culture we'd been discussing, he would relate differently to currency.

I choose to talk about my own experience (other posts in this thread have been criticised for talking generalities). Oh, and I have cleaned out the most appalling domestic kitchen bins full of maggots, so that's a start... I have tried to show from my own experience that I prefer a job in which I find "job satisfaction" to one which pays well, but will accept one which pays well to achieve my financial short term goals. If they were paid equally I'd choose the "worse" (to many people's way of thinking) job of washing shit off people, to sitting in a office.
I agree with DanaC that there are many people who thrive on the responsiblity/big wheel thing for the sake of it, rather than specifically for the cash. I'm not one of them.
in the above quotes the bold emphasis is mine. I don't mind that all these posts are about you. You are talking about your own experience.

Which brings us to the question of which goods and services you exchange it for ... which are necessities and which are luxuries?



and who is to decide? Or is it, if you step back a little, just common sense?

What's really peculiar to my mind about the way our culture relates to the economy, is that we usually pay more for luxuries than we do for necessities. Cetainly in terms of the way we pay wages. A doctor is a necessity for the country, a footballer is not. Who do we pay more?

If financial reward is how we measure our value to society, does this mean we realy value footballers above doctors, or does it mean that we don't actually indicate value through money?

who are you responding to?

oops. sorry, not sure why I wrote bruce :P thanks sky. I've amended it now :P

no appology required. It made me realize I didn't know UT's name. What IS UT's name? Hey UT what is your name? Chris? umm I have no idea.

Tony. And yours?

~Kat

Cathy, nice to meet you.

The amount of indoctrination needed to make a change as drastic as the one
you are describing would be so massive as to be unthinkable Dana. This is assuming a transformation in a (relatively)short time span of course. If, over the next 200-300 years our culture shifts in that direction, that's slightly different in my mind even though I am convinced it will not happen for that sustained period.

What I could see happening is something like an aftershock effect from the hippie years. Many of them took jobs in education and thought it was their mission to 'reeducate' a new generation. The next decade or two might very well be much more socialist, but such systems are unsustainable in the long term and it will revert to an independently monetary one.

I'm a little curious though. In your ideal system, are people allowed to move where they want and participate in whatever other systems they wish? In the US you would be totally free to join a commune and do business with the rest of us. Would you allow capitalists to operate in smaller micro-economies which could interact at will with the general public?

Capitalists would be able to operate within that system, the only thing that changes is the relationship to wages and the effect that wuold have on the flow of finance. Freedom of movent and choice would be essential.

And I agree with your first point about the violence of change. This is why I am not a revolutionary :) Having spent a lot of time amongst some of the wilder trots in my country I am quietly convinced that I'd be on the other side of the barracades were they to try and provoke a revolution :P

Good point, well put.

aww,

right back at'cha

I think it definitely means we don't indicate value through money. It seems like evidence that supply and demand is a primary factor in how much someone is paid. Compare the number of professional footballers in the world to the number of doctors: There's your wage differential.

Supply and demand again. There are only a handful of top footballers who entertain hundreds of millions, and the same handful of top docs can only treat a limited number of patients a day. The footballer who is not entertaining is paid less than the average doc. I can't find the inequity.

In effect in a free market, the decision of what makes life meaningful and important is made by everyone, and not by a cultured few. It is what is right for them, and it's not your business to question it. In fact one might note that if you consider it your business to reform others' choices they will be less interested in having you lead them. Thus your control becomes a matter of force.

We might next ask which cultures produce the best doctors and the most medical cures. Which ones have the most Nobel prizes for medicine? Here's the list. Do the winners come from the countries where they centrally plan what people are paid? Wow, Not At All! For the most part they come from countries that produce highly-paid footballers. Maybe there is something to this freedom to choose deal eh?

What's odd though, is that the the top of the heap brain surgeons and research scientists who are as rare as the top of the heap footballers, are paid less than the Beckhams of the world.

One of the things that puzzles me about the arguments for supply and demand economics being something that is natural and inherent and impossible to regulate away sustainably, is that actually we do regulate the supply and demand model. Our economic health depends upon such regulation. Most countries which have embraced capitalism have also instituted strict anti-monopoly regulations.

In reality true laissez-faire economics would lead to a handful of monopolies controlling each sector of the economy. We institute laws against monopolies to protect the free flow of trade and to allow competition within the market to drive prices down and spread the effects of wealth creation.

I would be interested to hear an explanation as to why it is acceptable/desirable for controls to be added to that part of the system and not acceptable/desirable to control the part of economy that deals with wage levels.

The monopoly argument was started a century ago and it is not aging well in the information era and through the end of scarcity.

In this country, with the least number of restrictions, we find that almost all monopolies are unnatural, requiring government support to retain their monopoly power (such as public utilities).

There hasn't been a serious anti-trust case fought here in years. The last one was Microsoft and although they were not successfully prosecuted, it would appear that the most serious competition for their product has appeared, cannot be bullied out of the market, and is 100% free of charge.

I call that a good outcome. The long run corrects better than the courts ever could.

I have a completely out of my ass explanation. There are controls on wage levels. Minimum wage being one of them. Minimum wage laws like anti-monopoly laws are restrictions on what I suppose you might call the controlling class. Anti-monopoly and minimum wage laws give the little guy a chance to survive, and if they have the right stuff, compete.

It all has to do with minimal levels of fairness. If you regulate past a certain point you are enforcing too much fairness. Where is the line? I don't know, but putting restrictions on the top-end of earning seems wrong (aside from reasonable taxation).

And that is the essence of the disagreement: as you say, where is the line?

Beckhams only play for twenty years, if they are VERY lucky, and it takes a MASSIVE infrastructure to be a Beckham (what they make is not what they actually end-up with, not even close).
Doctors practice for as long as they like and don't need managers, agents, personal assistants, PR managers, to travel a fraction as much, and tend to have much longer lives than sports figures. The money they finally end up with is earned and is probably about what those top doctors make, or less.
And, unlike those doctors, they work 18 hour days, seven days a week.
I would not do that job.

But... but... you want poor people to be able to afford necessities!

You've shot your own analogy right there--can you name a single "top of the heap" brain surgeon or research scientist? The average person in your country watches and enjoys football, and especially enjoys Beckham himself. The average person does not require brain surgery, and certainly doesn't receive it from that one top surgeon. It's not about the rarity of the person, it's about the quantity of service they provide.

What confuses me is what we pay teachers and those who care for our children.
We need to create demand in that market to raise the quality of those doing the job.

I would generally agree to the idea of making teaching positions very well paid, and making them very dependent on performance. You would need to abolish teachers unions, make the training program very rigorous and demanding, and have schools compete for the best teachers. Essentially you would need to limit the field much more to achieve a consistently higher quality of teacher.

If you have schools competing fo rthe best teachers, would that not mean that some schools lose that competition and end up with most of the less effective teachers? What's the chances that the school that failed to attract the better teachers would likely be the ones erving poorer areas?

The teacher's union is the most wrecked piece of shit you can imagine!

Why, what's wrong with it?

When I was involved it, in no way, represented teachers best interests.
The ways in which this was evident are too long to list... just know that "no way" is literal.
That it is called a union is a joke, it is as much a union as a building on a college campus is.

Unforgivable. We have a few unions who are a bit ineffective, but the worst is when you get a branch (it's rarely a whole union that's at fault, more likely a branch in a particular part of the country) where the branch officers are working primarily to continue their own role. I've come across one or two like that. One of the Leeds branches of one of the major general unions is awful fo rthat. They run it like a club. They are getting paid by their nominal employer, to work for the union and represent their members interests: instead they fuck about wanking each other off about how great they are, knocking off at 3 on Friday to go to the pub and just not being effective, or interested in their members' struggles.

I know this because they got so pissed off with the few who did do their job and therefore made them look bad that they effectively ran one of them out of the union. Made up a bunch of stuff, slurred him and ended with him having to change unions. Shame, he really gave a shit about his members. The worst of the guys at that union, is an incompetant alcoholic and if he ever had to try and survive again in Social Work he'd end up pensioned off before you can say "drunken twat".

But...in my experience there's usually enough decent people working in most union branches that most of them at least try to represent their members effectively.

In terms of teaching unions: I think the NUT is a solid member led union. Certainly my interraction with teachers from that union and their reps has impressed me.

In the US with the teacher's union, it is a national problem.
They just will not stand-up for what the teacher's need.
There is a perception problem, that when they do that they are "holding the children hostage". Which is utter bullshit!
It is clear that teachers are not paid well enough and do not have proper benefits, otherwise we would have enough qualified, decent, teachers. THAT is clear.
Not only that, when local administrators break rules it it next to impossible to get the union to stand-up for the teacher.
We are expected to work during our breaks and when we eat... the list is endless.

*Shakes head* that's really sad. The old argument of 'holding children/patients/victims of crime/etc" hostage by demands for fair pay and conditions is something that really winds me up. It's the argument that's always levelled at the teachers, nurses, the rank and file police and prison wardens, firemen etc by politicians over here too. We recently had the first ever wildcat strike by prison warders, who had finally had enough of being told their requests for fair pay and more attention to safety would not be considered.

One of the worst effects of the Thatcher years (and I must confess it has continued apace under my own party) on unions was losing the right, in many parts of the public sector, to collective bargaining. It has declawed many of the most potent unions and has tended to particularly damage pay and conditions for teachers.

I wish I had the time and my hands felt better.
Just say that it was a LONG day for all the teachers.
Last straw for me was in the teachers lounge with about ten teachers, some of them lifers.
I said, after he left, "does it get any better?".
Most just shook their head.
I said "fuck this, I'm not doing this any more".
No one said "stay, it is worth it, do it for the kids... etc".... several, that day and the next told me they wished that they could and are going to quit when they can. That they envied me.
That was ALL I heard.
Once I got to teaching college and when I get to now by phone, internet and the occasional visit, it is the most rewarding thing I have in my life next to my wife and son.
More than actually doing the thing I am teaching.
That is how bad it is... it can ruin that for people.
The US educational system is a black-hole right now and I lay 90% of it squarely on the doorstep of the teacher's union.

Really, teachers are not going to need to strike... we are just quitting.

In your opinion, where did the teacher's union go wrong? I mean in terms of how it represented its members. What do you think they should have done differently? (if it's too long and involved to go into I understand:))

I don't know... but to me... it seems like it works for the enemy, or itself.
Somewhere, it lost it's charter.
They need to ONLY work for the interests of the teachers.

It pays teachers on how long they've been working, not performance.

Then we have the problem with merit pay and teachers just teaching for standardized testing. The only real way to make teaching very efficient, I am talking about what is best for the students, is a subjective pay that varies by how well the teachers teach that goes beyond standardized testing but that is extremely difficult if not impossible.

I've never really understood what was so evil about teachers in low performance areas teaching to a test. The standardized tests cover a baseline proficiency in math, reading, and writing. If students cannot even score reasonably well on these, then shouldn't the focus be on making sure the basics are covered before launching into more esoteric subjects?:confused:

Its brainwashing. I don't want to be to be taught word for word what to think, I would rather be taught how to think and figure it out by myself. You can't test how well you can think on standardized tests. There are times when you have to have subjects force fed to you, but a lot of times you don't and it ruins the whole point of getting an education.

Standardized tests also have a very bad reputation for being culturally biased.

That's crap. Basic arithmetic should be "word for word what to think." There is no deep analytical skill involved in the base levels of these tests.

The answer you're actually looking for is: the problem with teaching to the test is that every student who isn't a complete moron is bored out of their minds. Which just means there should be more honors/regular/remedial separation at younger ages, and more willingness to make kids repeat grades early on. Poor test scores reflect very little on a teacher's skill and very much on the general performance of the students in the area.

Thats why I said some subjects need to be force fed to you.

That would help but it still doesn't allow a child develop basic problem solving skills for situations they've never been in before. All it does is give them more information they can forget in three months.

There should be two different types of classes, one be the type we have right now where it is an A-F scale and more or less standardized and then there should be another group that would be pass/fail that isn't based off a curriculum but can help the students with life skills and basic understanding of the world. Those classes would be mostly electives and be classes like Phy Ed, Sociology, Psychology, Child Development, Political Science, Debate, Personal Finance, etc.

You're honestly not making any sense. You do realize there's a difference between "standardized testing" and the generally accepted curriculum for classes in a given state, right?

Yes, but on the part you quoted me on I was talking about actually removing the generally accepted curriculum or at least really limiting it for some of the elective classes.

Okay... but that still has nothing to do with standardized testing. There's "improving the overall education system," which seems to be what you're talking about, and "standardized testing," which is a quick little check-in from the state making sure kids can actually read and add numbers long after they were supposed to have learned it in the first place.

If the kids can't read, it's not because they didn't have enough 'P.E., Sociology, Psychology, Child Development, Political Science, Debate, or Personal Finance' classes. If the kids could pass these incredibly low-end tests in the first place like they ought to be able to, then there would be room to talk about adjusting the curriculum to more life-enhacing topics. Being taught how to think for yourself and figure out real-world problems comes after knowing how to add.

Reading, math and science cannot be culturally biased if it is a standard.
Unless you are talking about not putting slang on the tests?
I have no issue with a low-end standard test for those basic subjects... the union would have to agree on the test though.

Ok.

It is the word problems that make them culturally biased, not the actual material.

Please remember that rkzenrage continues to discuss all of American education based on his very limited knowlege. New York and Pennsylvania both have powerful teachers unions, high salaries, and huge barriers to employment. You cannot use a broad brush when discussing education in the US.

What do you mean by barriers to employment?

Certification requirements. Rob apparently lives in a state where anybody can teach in a public school. In NY/PA you need your degrees (BA and MA) along with a lot of testing and continuing coursework beyond the degrees. I was talking to a friend yesterday who was a certified elementary teacher in Minnesota, but can't even substitute in PA.

A word problem is a word problem. If it is mangos or trains the math is the same.

No, it is not. There was a question on the 4th grade(?) math exam in New York State a few years ago dealing with subway stops, something completely foreign to rural upstate children, which they could not put into context. Cultural bias needs to be considered when writing tests.

Yeah, I'm sure they have no trains there & that it entirely changed the nature of the math.