Arnold Hillman and his wife Carol are educators who retired from their workin Pennsylvania and moved to South Carolina, where they continued to work with impoverished high school children in underfunded rural schools, but as volunteers. Arnold writes a blog, which I urge you to follow. He was astonished, for example, when the Governor and Legislature forbade the public schools to impose mask mandates. He thought it was crazy. what sane person would fight measures to protect public health.
In this post, Arnold looks at the salaries of sports announcers. Not the players, but the people who talk about the players. Then he looks at the salaries of cable news talking heads. Then the coaches of professional sports teams and a few successful actors.
All of these salaries are in the millions of dollars.
Then he notes the average salaries of teachers, nationally and in South Carolina.
We pay for what we value.
Something is screwy here.
Diane Ravitch's blog 
I was surprised to see a story on an Alabama TV channel announcing that three Mobile area high schools are getting new football stadiums. In the South football is king, and it is also a big revenue producer that school districts claim filters into the classroom as well. Some high school coaches are paid a couple of hundred thousand dollars a year while classroom teachers struggle to pay their bills. It shows us what their priority is.
Sports coaches are also empowered with effective tools to discipline insubordination and slacking off. Teachers are not. If they were, we’d have more disciplined and talented students.
I’d like the ability to send slackers to summer school or Saturday school.
Rachel Maddow gets paid over a million to continue to promote debunked Russiagate nonsense. People who support the establishment get well-compensated for doing so. Sportscasters are the circus part of bread and circus (we don’t get much of the bread part) that keeps us all distracted from what’s going on – an invaluable service to the establishment.
ah, but junk food — food with barely any nutritional value packaged up in excessive non-biodegradable plastic — gets cheaper. Hit up an extra-cheese-burrito franchise, open yet another bag of chips, and sit down in front of “entertainment” cable TV news. Surely even the Romans would be impressed.
Tucker Carlson, Sean Hannity, Mark Levin, etc., get paid millions to spread right wing lies, fabrications, half-truths, misrepresentations, obfuscations and propaganda. Talk radio is 98% far right wing flame throwers in the style of the late Rush Limbaugh, awarded the Medal Of Freedom (sic) by the orange Il Duce.
You and others may have noticed a sudden infestation of fake comments, containing tiny excerpted from posts that appeared months ago. I don’t know what their purpose is, but I have deleted every one that I saw.
There is no meritocracy in this country. It’s survival of the dimwit-est.
America is now a full fledged banans republic.
And Americans are the only ones in the world who can’t see it.
Banana republic
Yes, “something is screwy here,” and it’s called white supremacy, cutthroat capitalism, and the Koch network’s idea of libertarianism.
If folks have access to JSTOR they can look at the seminal article The Economics of Superstars by Sherwin Rosen (American Economic Review, 1981). In that article he argues that the extremely high pay of superstars comes from 1) people of different skill levels being poor substitutes for each other (you can’t make up for missing a great musician’s concert by attending two or more concerts given by mediocre musicians) and 2) a technology that scales to allow many people to benefit from the individual’s efforts without the individual having to do additional work. The most skilled plumber is limited in the number of customers served but the most skilled author can sell one hundred or one million copies of a book with the same effort.
Agree with point 2. Not so much with point 1. Selling entertainment is often a race to the bottom even as it is a race to the bank.
I have to argue with the notion that the goodies go to the most talented. Consider book publishing. Dan Brown. Koontz. Peddlers of clichés. TERRIBLE writers. But they serve the large midwit markets. And the guitarists who make the most money? Objectively among the worst. Throw a stick at a guitar program in any music school and you will hit a FAR more capable musician.
Several best-selling novelists actually turned to setting up novel-writing factories–hiring freelancers to churn out paint-by-number formulaic bestsellers with their names on them.
And painters are another great example where talent and skill do not necessarily play the key role in monetary success. Artists are often “made” by galleries, auction houses and others trying to generate profits. One can make a pretty good argument that many of the artists of the “modern art” period were chosen based on their ability to crank out crap.
Crap that art dealers had convinced people was very valuable.
LOL. Yes.
The US economy is actually based on the production of trash.
And weapons, of course.
Gotta protect the trash.
But I guess some (TE?) might argue that the ability to “crank out crap” is a valuable skill.
And then there are the people who have reached the Pinnacle of success in the podcast world.
Joe Rogan is the poster boy for cranking out crap in that regard.
He’s elevated it to high art .
Cheech and Chong got it right…
“And it don’t bother me if people think I’m funny
‘Cause I’m a big rock star and I make a lots of money
Money, money, money, money
Money, money, ahhhhh! Hahaha hahaha hahaha
I’m so bloody rich, hahaha
I own apartment buildings and shopping centers, hahaha
I only know three chords, hahaha
Watch me burn, hahaha
You fools, hahaha
Even academics is full of counter examples where the people making the most money are cranking out crap for their billionaire funders (Koch, Gates and others). Entire departments at many universities (including what are supposedly our “best” universities) are now engaged in crap production.
Just one example: MIT’s media lab(which was accepting money from pedophilanthropist Jeffrey Epstein ) recently shut down a project that was a complete fraud.
And at MIT , fraud is nothing new, as Physicist Ted Postol highlighted with his expose’ of a Star Wars related military contract at MITs Lincoln labs.
Teachingeconomist’s own field of economics is especially rife with crap factories.
I said above that the US economy is based on the production of trash AND weapons.
But in some cases, the weapons ARE trash.
The F35 is a good example.
One of the main reasons it has not been canceled outright is that members of Congress (Bernie Sanders included) bring in jobs and money for their states because of the program.
It’s trash both before and after the crash.
In fact, trash is the reason for crash.
I was recently listening to an episode of Ezra Kleins podcast where they discussed the need for the media to protect democracy over both-sidism. As they discussed the motivation for the false equivalency reporting we now deal with, what they did not acknowledge was the influence of the profit motive over reporter discretion. As with much of the NIMBYism that keeps us from honestly dealing with profound housing inequality, those in the mainstream media who bemoan contemporary political vitriol make little effort to resist it because it brings them big bucks. Just like current 365 day a year politicking, the news industry is quite profitable. What incentive do they have to actually change?
Wow, I a glad that I waited a little bit to respond to this post, as I see lots of comments. First Lloyd – you said it’s white supremacy – have you noticed the salaries and the racial background of many star athletes in sports? Just wondering. So, how is that “white supremacy”
Second, I do wish that if someone creates a blog post that they can at least use proper grammar and proper facts – It’s not Jared Letts, but rather Jared Leto who is the actor.
Third, the post mention the salaries of some college and pro athletes. Now, one thing that I will agree in terms of salaries is how contracts are written. Check out this article on “Dead Money” – money paid to coaches who are not coaching right now, essentially getting paid to NOT work (https://www.espn.com/college-football/story/_/id/32552130/schools-spent-5336-million-dead-money). I do think that this is ridiculous, but its about how the contracts are written. Imagine if teacher contracts were written that way, where someone who was so bad was paid to go away. Even if you didn’t agree with the contract, I’m sure you would sign it, right?
Fourth, on the salaries of college football and basketball programs, the reality is those two sports often funds nearly ALL of the athletic department at major universities. That means that all non-revenue sports, including their scholarships, are often a product of money that comes from football and men’s basketball. So, less success in those two sports means fewer $$ coming in for non-revenue sports, which can mean fewer scholarships, which could mean fewer opportunities for some students to attend college.
Now, I will also say this – perhaps teaching should be more like athletes – Key and Peele did a great sketch looking at this (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYOg8EON29Y). Should teachers be free agents like athletes and be paid different amounts based on results (which would be test scores, most likely, which I know will cause lots of issues here)….
My point in this LONG post – yes, we all think that teachers should be paid more. But why does one have to put down others in different professions to do so…