site banner

Small-Scale Question Sunday for February 12, 2023

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

4
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Question: Is it possible to raise wages high enough in U.S. Government to once again attract high caliber talent, without making jealous/discouraging the current batch of "lower quality" talent occupying the roles currently? I'm thinking of attracting young, top generalist talent of the type that otherwise would work on wall street or tech startups.

Full context of my thought experiment:

I've been very mildly sad lately thinking about the low quality of talent within the U.S. government. I don't remember the last time that one of my smarter friends decided to work for the bureaucracy. In particular I'm convinced that the wages are so obscenely low relative to the private sector, that unless you are already independently wealth or expect to benefit from the revolving door, there is not sufficient incentive at all to join the government other than favoring laziness/ work life balance.

Take public school teachers for example. A school district like Scarsdale NY, can afford to pay $150k+ for each high school teacher, its a chicken and egg thing though because the taxpayers there highly value education and would rather have a good public school with high taxes rather than paying comprable or more money to send them to private schools if their local public schools were shitty. This is an extreme anomaly like 3+ standard deviations above the average US teacher salary.

However, even if we decided nationally to pay teachers nationally as much as Scarsdale. 1) you would probably strains the budgets & bankrupt every local & state government 2) you would be grossly overpaying for the existing, less talented talent currently in the roles.

In theory you could gate new hires with a much higher salary and a much higher bar. But my suspicion is this breeds resentment amongst folks already in your workforce who are lower quality and lower paid. In its initial, smaller batch, more prestigious incarnations Teach for America did something like this where it got the 2nd rate students from Ivy Leagues to try it out for a few years. However, it seems like this barely made a dent and over time it seems to have gotten less prestigious as well. My 5000 ft view largely unresearched interpretation is it was "dragged down" to closer to the average of the teaching profession as opposed to "dragging up" the teachers at the schools they were dispatched to.

This problem isn't public sector specific, there are plenty of bloated legacy business model companies in the world that face the exact same problem as they scale and grow to the lowest common denominator. But at least in theory market competition should be a healthy force of creative destruction and prune out the truly unproductive companies. However, in the public sector there is no such mechanism and we in the U.S. seem to be okay with the government being a walk out the office after 35 hours and go fishing type workplace, with the tradeoff being secure employment albeit with low pay and hence unable to attract the best and brightest. Yes you do have subcontractors like the Anduril's or Mckinsey's of the world hired by government to go solve things, but that doesn't feel efficient to me.

That's why I want to see more charter schools and school vouchers. Their existence demonstrates that you can make a better school than a public school using the same amount of funding.

Don't know how to apply this to other government services.

The same or less amount of funding, but more parent buy-in. There are limits to how selective a charter school is allowed to be, but "the parents cared enough and were middle class enough to navigate application red tape for a slot in an admissions lottery and a chance to drive their kid to a more distant school" is already adding non-trivial selection bias.

I'm greatly in favor of charter schools and school vouchers, and even if there were no effects besides selection bias, I think that level of unintentional tracking is probably better for both the selected kids (who can learn more things, if higher average class ability lets them go faster past core material) and the unselected kids (who can learn things more, if lower average class ability encourages the teacher to spend more time reviewing core material more intensely) ... but I wouldn't necessarily expect exceptional charter school results to generalize to full unselected populations.