Oklahoma’s teachers are revolting – no, that’s not a personal comment, I mean they’re on strike over the pittance they’re being paid. They most certainly do deserve better, so I have a suggestion on how to make it happen: They should be paid the same way the rest of us are. That means determining salaries through individual negotiation between the person willing to do the job and the person who has the job that needs to get done. That’s the way the balance of supply and demand gets achieved.
Bloomberg View’s editorial board says we should “Pay teachers what they’re worth.” That is obviously true. But what’s up for debate is how we calculate what teachers are worth. Many pundits are pointing out that teachers get less than other people with degrees. So what? There’s also many people arguing that good teachers add a lot of value to children’s future lives. Entirely true, but so what? Both arguments are leading to an attempt to divine some ethereal value which we can ascribe to teachers’ labor.
This is to make the medieval mistake of Aquinas, in fact an earlier one of Plato, in ascribing some just value to something. The problem with just values is that they don’t exist, and also they’re not calculable. It’s simply not true that the value of one graduate’s labor is equal to that of another. There’s not even any connection between the correct value of two graduates’ labor. This is why those who do grievance studies are overpaid at Starbucks and those who do theoretical physics are arguably underpaid on Wall Street.
As Adam Smith pointed out, the actual value of labor is determined by the balance of the demand of those who want a job done and the supply of those willing and able to get it done. That’s it – there is no justice, fairness, or comparability involved.
If Oklahoma can’t get quality teachers at the price it currently pays, then it should raise those wages. If it can get them, then it shouldn’t raise wages and that’s all there is to that. It’s quite true that Oklahoma is among “the bottom three states in teacher’s salaries.” So? Someone does have to be in the bottom three, it’s only in Lake Wobegon that everyone is above average. And again, if Oklahoma can get the teachers it needs at that price then that’s just what the fair price is – and if they can’t get the teachers it needs at that price, then it isn’t the fair price.
The unions aren’t being of all that much use here either. In a right-to-work state “the American Federation of Teachers has about 2,700 members out of 42,000 teachers.”
So, what’s the solution? Oklahoma should abolish the very idea of “teachers’ pay” and have pay for Bob, Billy, Sally, and Sarah. An employer thinks about how much they’d like to fill a job, how much they’d like a certain person to fill it, and makes an individual offer. The individuals then consider how much they’d like to do that job, and how much they’d want to be paid to do it. When there’s a match, a new hire is made. That’s the only system which aligns with Adam Smith’s point about the value of labor. Supply and demand are what determines it, nothing else at all.
Simply abolish statewide pay scales, and let each school set the wages of the teachers it wants as it wishes. That will mean higher pay for good teachers and perhaps lower pay for bad ones.
Excellent, job done and we can all go home.
There simply is no calculable value to the labor of “a teacher.” There’s only that of a specific teacher in a specific place at a specific time, that being determined by the supply and demand in that place, time, and for that subject. Thus that’s how pay should be determined. Individual negotiations for each job and the heck with statewide pay scales.
Tim Worstall (@worstall) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. He is a senior fellow at the Adam Smith Institute. You can read all his pieces at The Continental Telegraph.
