Once again, it goes back to supply and demand. People with good
writing skills seem to be more numerous than those that can teach
math. Thus, the price of writers should (and is) lower than
mathematicians.
-fabio
Are Humanities less real skills that, let's say, maths or economics? If
So, are professors really underpaid?
A few thoughts. When people say that teachers are underpaid I don't think that they
are mainly referring to professors. I think its K-12 where unfavorable comparisons
are often made between the salaries paid to BA teachers and HS grad semi-skilled
OK, Bryan is right (as was Alex) and I'm wrong. This from the horses mouth
(a note I got today from Judith Harris):
===
My theory is definitely not an excuse for people to throw up their
hands and say "We give up -- there's nothing we can do!"
All this time I've been living under the impression that there wasn't a Santa Claus
and that upward sloping demand curves were the unicorns of economic theory. Alas, I
was wrong.
The current presidential race had already convinced me that Santa Claus does in fact
exist afterall, and he even
Ed Dodson responding...
John Samples wrote:
... complainers evaluate
themselves according to their (self ascribed) "merit". Labor markets, on the
other hand, evaluate them according to their value to others. Which
evaluation should we trust? Someone who is the judge in their own case or an
Bryan Caplan wrote:
At least on my reading, a lot of cognitive psychologists want to say
more than "People occasionally reason imperfectly, and policy might
improve on that." Rather, they are saying "We now know that human
judgment is quite poor, and economic models that presume otherwise are
Lawrence Summers and Brad De Long, among many others, are arguing
that the productivity/investment/high-tech boom of the mid to late
1990's was caused by Clinton's reduction of the deficit. Summers and De
Long basically argue that *all* of the deficit reduction went into
investment. Neither
Bryan wrote:
===
This is almost orthogonal to my original point, but not quite. It
wouldn't be interesting if the expected cost of bad judgment was
$100/year, would it? So even taking a policy perspective, expected
value of error matters.
Agreed, but I think
Isn't one of the reasons why some highly qualified people feel underpaid
the fact that in many structures, they feel they have a value
that is unacknowledged or unexploited by their hierarchy?
This may be particularly true when the hierarchy doesn't grasp
the technicalities of the work and/or the
Robin Hanson wrote:
To me the central issue is instead human meta-rationality. If cognitive
errors make workers sometimes miss-estimate the safety of a job, but
workers realize that they might make such errors, then wiser-than-thou
academics just need to *tell* workers that their particular
Bryan Caplan wrote:
... If people have time-inconsistent preferences, but realize this fact,
then it can be enough to give them means to commit to future choices.
If people can neglect possible ways a contract can go bad, but realize
this fact, they can give arbitrators discretion to deal
This reminds me of a paper I read as an undergrad in micro theory. I
think it was by Harvey Liebenstein and titled Bandwagon, Snob, and Veblen
Effects. I don't remember the journal, but it was probably from the 1960s
or early 1970s.
Art Woolf
On Tue, 26 Sep 2000 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
My understanding of the upward sloping demand curve is that consumers may
be willing to buy more of a product if the price is higher because the
higher price may signal better quality.
This seems to imply that two factors are changing. I always thought that
along a demand curve just one factor
"Francois-Rene Rideau [EMAIL PROTECTED]" wrote:
Isn't one of the reasons why some highly qualified people feel underpaid
the fact that in many structures, they feel they have a value
that is unacknowledged or unexploited by their hierarchy?
That is exactly right. Professional athletes are
On Tue, 26 Sep 2000, Cyril Morong wrote:
My understanding of the upward sloping demand curve is that consumers may
be willing to buy more of a product if the price is higher because the
higher price may signal better quality.
If the perception is that it is of better quality, then it is a
You can download it at:
http://papers.ssrn.com/paper.taf?ABSTRACT_ID=232542
Scott Merryman
---
Where's the paper printed? I did a search on Econlit and couldn't
find
anything.
Daljit Dhadwal
Robin Hanson wrote:
People talk a lot about their difficulty in committing to long term plans.
They choose savings plans that they can't get out of. They take efforts to
avoid being around tempting candy bars.
These look more like conflicting preferences to me than
"meta-rationality."
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