Public Interest Versus Self-Interest

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This is the result of another thread in which Darkwolf brought up some interesting contrasts between the government and the private sectors, and a comparative look at the quality of each in relation to the other.


This is in reponse to Darkwolf's last point on the social reponsibility thread:

I think especially in government the quality of some people serving is not very good (Tom Delay is good example). It does require a sacrifice of income to work in public service, although Delay left a job as an exterminator, so it was a huge promotion for him to get into public service (which he may soon be leaving). The thing about public service is that one has to put the greater good of the public first. And I agree some highly qualified people are not willing to do this. Rummy and Cheney both got started in government, left, made tons of money in the private sector and came back again (one can only guess at their reasons for doing so). Nevertheless, there are some highly qualified people who are motivated by the public good and not self-interest, going all the way back to people like Washington, Jefferson, Adams, etc....

 

But those people tend to be the ones who take care of our sick and elderly, the ones who teach our children, protect our homes from crime and fire. They do it because they see it is a good that needs to be done, a calling if you would like and the people in charge knows and can thus keep down both pay and status cause they know the, in their minds, suckers will still do the job.

 

Better to have someone doing the job because they want to save lives than have someone doing the job just for the money. However I do think that people in the emergency services and education should be paid more since their services are so necessary for society.

 

Its a shame that you have to go back so far.

 

As someone who works in the public sector, this question is pertinent for me. While people who work in the public sector tend to have a lower base salary than those doing similar work in the private sector, it is true that working in the public sector does have some rewards that the private sector does not offer.

Even if you don't have a keen interest in helping people, there are some people who prefer working in the public sector. Some of those benefits include:

1. You get all national holidays off. I don't have to work on days like Martin Luther King's birthday, President's Day, or Columbus Day. These are all national holidays, but the thing is that 90% of the poeple in the private sector work on these days. In the private sector, the only holidays you get off are the big ones, like Thanksgiving, Christmas and Independence Day (oh and most recently, just about everyone gets New Year's Day off).

This is especeially true regarding teachers. Most teachers get two months off during the summer - from late June through late August - and additionally get long vacations for Thanksgiving and Christmas.

2. The medical benefits are excellent. I have a full medical, eye, and dental plan, and the employee contribution is the equivalent of about two hours of salary every month.

3. Job stability - and this is the biggest one. Once you get into the public sector, your odds of keeping your job are very high. Unless you are completely incompetent or do something that is clearly illegal, you won't lose your job. You'll never get laid off because of the company's bottom line.

So really, I think people go into the public sector for some of the benefits that it does offer, albeit salary not being one of them. In my experience very few people go into the public sector because they have a "calling" for the public good.

 

Depends on what you do really, those things you have listed are some of the major perks with public work even if even they are eroding nowadays. Here in Sweden we used to say that the governments cookie was small but secure, that is not as true today as it was before. If we look at teaching I actually think it is a calling, maybe not only but it plays a large part for many people that they truly want to and enjoy working with youngsters trying to help them as best as they can. I think there are few jobs which are as gratifying as a successful teachers, but then again, I think there are few jobs which are as ungrateful as an unsuccessful one.


As for the teachers getting lots of time off, that is at least here in Sweden an illusion. They have to work just as many hours a year as other full time employees so the time they get off in the summer for example they have make up for during the rest of the year. Thinking that teachers get as much time off as the pupils is also false, they stay for a few extra week in the beginning of every summer and come back a few weeks before the pupils. Then we have the fact that they have very little control of when to have their vacation, they have to take in the summer whether they want to or not, most workplaces have vacation periods but few are as rigid as those for teachers.

 

So, to return for a moment to the quality of public school teachers in the US...

If we assume that something is "broken" about the US public school system, what is the answer here? There is a wide range in quality between public schools. Much of that hinges on the wealth of that school; schools are funded by federal, state, and local taxes, so public schools from a wealthy area can have much much more money to spend per student than schools from poor areas. This translates to more resources and programs for the students (a schools I went to at the elementary level had a quasi-montessori program one full school day a week for gifted students), along a higher rate of pay for teachers. The teachers, correspondingly, were of a much higher standard: much more knowledgable about their material, and much more engaged with the students. And, as most of the students were from middle and upper-middle class backgrounds, and had internalized their parents' expectations that they do well, they didn't have to spend all of their time disciplining the kids. So most teachers would prefer this kind of school district, with its higher pay and better adjusted students, allowing the district to hire the best applicants for the job.

One recent idea is to make schools competative (the market knows all) by allowing students to transfer to other schools or districts. Issues with this are that: 1) the middle and upper-middle class parents, being more educated themselves, would be most likely to take advantage of this, while they aren't the ones suffering the most in the current situation, and 2) if you assume mobility isn't an issue, who wouldn't want to move to a rich school from a poor one, so that the schools suffering the most from lack of funds would essentially be punished by removing even more public funds until they die out; a downward spiral kinda like 18th C debtor prison. Also, from recent stories in the news, recent attempts at privatizing public education through "charter schools" have met with failure...

So wouldn't the solution simply be to pay teachers more? If public school teachers, as Darkwolf suggests, less competant than people going into other professions, and if this is a problem, then why not make it more competative to get into teaching? Imagine what would happen if the gov't decided to double teachers' salaries, while maintaining a cap on the number of teachers. Imagine how many more people would go into education then, including professionals from other fields (law, business, etc) who had always wanted to teach, and who could now more easily justify getting school certification. More and more people would apply for teaching positions, and school districts would have enough applications that they would only hire the best applicants, thus improving the pool of teacher quality.

And so, yet again, "competition" would win the day. But strangely enough, teacher salaries don't seem to be on the Bush agenda...

 

I don't have to imagine - I know exactly what would happen - my local taxes would have to increase by about 30% to pay for the extra salaries. In Maryland, the majority of the school costs are paid through the county tax system. If we doubled teacher's pay, I don't even want to think about how many hundreds of thousands of dollars they would need to collect in extra taxes. My wife is a teacher, and at her school alone, there are about 50 teachers. Doubling salaries for that school alone would require an extra EDIT: Misplaced decimal! It's $2.5 million, not $250,000 END EDIT in additional revenue. And there are dozens of elementary schools, dozens of middle schools and dozens of high schools in the county. The 3% county tax I pay would have to be increased to at least to 4%, and probably higher.

They would also likely have to increase property taxes as well - mine are around $1,500 annually right now, and they would likely have to increase by a considerable percentage as well.

[ January 06, 2005, 21:09: Message edited by: Aldeth the Foppish Idiot ]

 

Nothing wrong with taxes if they go to something you deem important and worthy, impossible to both have the cake and eat it you know.

 

Tax jeez I don't mind taxes if I don't notice them but I lose half my pay every week in ****ing tax.

 

@ Sarevok

That's what I'm getting at too. I'm already paying taxes out the ass. Even if it is a few hundred dollars more, which would be a relatively small increase, I'm not too keen on the idea. And keep in mind that my wife would DIRECTLY benefit from doubling teacher salaries - to the point that what we made from in increase in salary would far outweigh the increase we'd pay out in taxes.

 

I don't believe that working in the public sector necessarily needs involve income sacrifice. Doctors, teachers, the justice system, law enforcement, the army - they all have a job and I believe in decent wage for decent work.

Here's the catch, however. Doctors, teachers etc need to be paid well, but politicians' relatives don't need to be CEOs, directors and board members in state-owned companies. Parliament and council members don't need to be able to set their own salaries and accord bonuses. Officers and clerks don't need to receive motivation bonuses irrespectively of the actual results of their work.

 

Well, the doubling salaries bit was a thought experiment after all...

Nonetheless, are you sure you're not overestimating the cost of increasing teacher salaries? I would guess that the cost of teacher salaries is a far far lower percentage of the total cost of public education (including all facilities costs, which have to be pretty huge, arts and athletics programs, curriculum materials, etc etc) than one would expect. And if indeed there is a shortage of good (as opposed to substandard) teachers, what are the alternatives to increase the supply?

Also, what is the percentage of local taxes that actually go toward public education? Wouldn't there be a long term benign effect on the local economy, with the graduation of a better educated workforce? How would this compare to the substantial tax breaks municipalities often offer to businesses to lure them in, in the hope they will make up those taxes by supplying jobs?

Finally, Aldeth, the increase in property tax wouldn't be a problem for you; I mean your wife's salary is doubling afterall...

 

@ Bion - good points

Unfortunately, I don't have my wife with me at the moment, and so, I have no idea how to answer many of your questions. I obviously don't know what percentage of the 3% taxes I pay to the county go to the schools either. Obviously, some of that 3% is for other services, such as trash collection, plowing snow from roads, and general roadway maintenance.

The only thing I can help with is the small amount of information I do have. Number crunching time - we can see if this is a reasonable amount or not. Let's take my wife's school as an example. My wife has been a teacher for 5 years now and has a salary of 40K. Many teacher's have their master's degree (increasing salary by 5K) and have worked far longer than she. I do not think that 50K is an unreasonable amount to guess as to what the average teacher at her school makes. Thus to pay the teachers, we're looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of $50K times 50 teachers, or $2.5 million. My wife works at a typical sized school. Let's say (and these are extremely conservative figures) that there are 20 elementary, 20 middle and 20 high schools in the county. So we have to take that $2.5 million and multiply it by 60. Grand total: $150 million. So that means that we'd need another $150 million to double their salaries.

But how much is that really? A quick check on google shows that there are 777,184 people living in the county, so $150 million comes out to $193 per person. Unfortunately, not all of those people are paying taxes, as 23.6% of them are minors, and 14.6% of them are retired. Meaning that 480,299 people are at least 18 and not retired. So that means, that the adult population, presumably the group we are collecting county taxes from, comes out to $312 per person. Perhaps an even more useful way to look at it, is look at the number of households: 299,877. On a per household basis, we'd need to raise taxes by $500.20 per household. Now, since the average household salary is $50,667, that means we'd need to increase taxes by approximately 0.99%. As it turns out, my initial guess of 1% increase looks pretty good!

EDIT: In a moment of illumination, I just realized something - I guessed that the average salary for a teacher was $50K. If the average HOUSEHOLD income in the county is only $50,667, it would appear that teachers actually do receive a decent salary. If this is in fact the case, does it make the entire arguement moot?

 

Hmm, you might be right on this one; from a school-choice advocate, it appears teachers aren't doing so poorly:

So, ehh, let's hear it for teacher's unions?

But it still seems problems exist getting qualified teachers to work in underfunded or troubled rural or inner city schools, and the quality of public schools is anything but consistent. Many of the attacks on public education -- homeschooling, school-choice, privatization, etc -- seek to address this, but is there a sense to which attacking the public nature of public education might end up consigning the poor to an even lower quality of education, and thus, even less likely to rise above their situation. Even the Economist notes that the growing gap between the wealthy and poor challenges America's cherished meritocracy:

Is this a problem? What combination of public and private efforts would best remedy this?

[ January 06, 2005, 23:33: Message edited by: Bion ]