>  people that do not hold certain dogmas and prejudices in their thought.

@Purin, what are you saying? It's better to engage in conversation with like-minded individuals instead of debating merits with opposing view points?

The issue here is that mand made several claims that did not agree with reality and hence called out on.

>  the use of inductive reasoning and logical fallacies such as ad hominem attacks are certainly not traits of an argument that merits debate.

When the opposition starts flinging cow dung, is it necessary to return the favor? I suppose it's up to the individual to decide whether to sink to the same level.

Clearly both sides here are guilty of that. The difference is one side sounds more reasonable than the other.

When you make extraordinary claims like "people with master degrees EASILY make $160,000/yr" and "teachers spend 2-3x teaching time to prepare", you better back them up.

How about, like lawyers, engineers, and doctors we privatize school teachers also? And give vouchers to parents so they can pay to a school that tries hard to keep useless costs down and make education the highest priority.

Just a thought.

Errrm, the vouchers would be money for a teacher....

> dpenguins wrote:

> id support higher wages for teachers if they got rid of tenure, based the raises on merit instead of length of time there and they had to take out malpractice insurance at astronomical rates like doctors and lawyers these days and be held accountable for negligent teaching.  a lot of medical professionals, or at least solo practitioners, are not making as much money as you might think when you look into how much loans they have to pay back and how much malpractice insurance costs they have to pay to keep their business running because assholes like me sue them all the time.

there is little to no accountability for state, government, union and public employees in general in the united states which means the only motivation to work hard is each individual's work ethic which obviously varies a great deal from person to person.  i've worked in state jobs and private sector jobs and have seen a significant difference in how much effort employees in both sectors put in.  for instance, when i worked at a state court one of the highest paid employees in the clerk's office, probably making about 80-100k, only looked for items on ebay all day except for 5 minutes at the end of the day when she had to sign off on some things.

less accountability and motive to excel should absolutely result in lower wages.  unfortunately, that is not how it works these days and anyone that is not in a state/union/public job can look up on their state government's site to see the wages of various public employees to confirm that.

Also, most new lawyers (unless hired by mommy or daddy's law firm) either make very little or no money right now depending if they get hired and depending where they live ha ha.  there are way too many new lawyers right now and as a result they are in low demand.

I agree with you on this point. There of course need to be incentives for good teaching. The problem, however, is the subjective nature of a teacher's quality: do you assess his or her abilities based on test scores? Or student evaluations? Or supervisor evaluations? All of these options are deeply flawed, whereas the evaluation for doctors and lawyers are relatively more straightforward. Moreover, since teaching is already a relatively unattractive career, it will become even more difficult to attract talent if one of its only perks--that of job stability--is taken away, thus exacerbating an already serious problem.

> Einstein wrote:

> Errrm, the vouchers would be money for a teacher....

So parents are given free money to pay for their kids' education? That's privatization?

Cool.  So doctors and lawyers who turn away the difficult cases are better than doctors and lawyers who take on challenging cases?

Yes and no.

I am arguing that in a free market where lawyers and doctors come to mutual agreements on whether to engage in a contractual agreement with the client/patient, a lawyer who has a readily available supply of clients (i.e., perhaps one who has 12 people that want to hire him, but only has time to handle 6 people) has an incentive to maximize their statistical quality under such a scenario.  Thus, the attorney can refuse the difficult cases, increasing their average percentage of wins by reducing the odds of failure... thus increasing the amount of people who want to hire him, further increasing his probability of success by allowing him more rejections.

To suggest, though, that there are necessarily "two castes" is sort of inconsistent, because that would assume people are homogenous.  A statistical imbalance can exist even if individuals are not homogenously motivated.

Plus, for a prosecuting attorney working for the government, this is a completely ass-backwards motivation, because a prosecuting attorney should want to seek the truth (i.e., drop charges when they know a person is innocent), but such an analysis would actually create an incentive for the prosecutor to prosecute anyway, or attempt to get a plea bargain.

> mandrewsf wrote:

> If that is the case, then since maximizing success rates is a rational course of action for any doctor or lawyer, then it necessarily do not cause statistical distortions since the basis of action for all actors are the same.
Also, by "lawyer" I did not mean to include public prosecutors, and I agree with you on that point.

No, because supply and demand are not homogenous.  As a client, all things being equal, I will prefer the lawyer who has a higher win ratio over the lawyer with a lower win ratio because the higher win ratio lawyer gives me the perception that I have a higher probability of winning.  So the lawyer with a higher probability of winning will have options which a lawyer with a lower probability of winning will not have.  Thus, the higher probability lawyer has the choice to make those exclusions which the lower probability lawyer cannot make, creating the dichotomy.  So even if all motivations are the same, all opportunities to act on those motivations are not.

Additionally, you're making a strawman argument here.  When I said no to your above question, that does not mean since there are not two different groups, there necessarily must be only one group.  In fact, I very specifically argued there was a large distribution within the group... you can't just dogmatically classify people in A or B, although you can recognize that incentives and economic structures place people within a distribution.

Not necessarily. What you say implies that certain lawyers are taking advantage of other lawyers by strategically choose clients. However, since lawyers are presumably rational and profit-maximizing, it is implied that this kind of action is the par de course. A distortion only occurs of some actors are taking advantage of other actors through in a market. However, when the act of taking advantage is normalized, i.e. everyone is "taking advantage" of each other, then no distortion occurs. A real-life example would be tariffs: when only a few countries are imposing tariffs, they are benefitting at the expense of international free-trade. However, when all countries are imposing tariffs, their advantage disappears.

> Zarf BeebleBrix wrote:

> No, you're only considering the supply side of the equation.  The demand side is the game-changer, the factor you're ignoring.  Even if we all have the same incentives, if you are receiving twice the number of client applications that I'm receiving, you can be more selective in choosing your clients, whereas I must accept a larger percentage of clients.  Thus, due to your ability to refuse clients, an ability which I am much less able to exercise, you have a greater capacity to actually make that decision than I have.  Thus, imbalance.

It doesn't matter if everyone wants to screw the system if only a limited portion (those which have a higher win percentage number) have the opportunity to do so.  Motive means nothing without opportunity.

I didn't read anything else but the last line . Motive is everything Zarf! Have you forgotten our conversation?