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Notes -
A major discrimination settlement has been reached with NYC candidate teachers.
The NY Post is reporting that New York City has reached a $1.8B bias settlement with roughly 5200 Black and Hispanic teachers who failed a New York State teaching certification exam, which prevented them from serving as teachers in NYC public schools. At least 225 would-be teachers will receive payments exceeding $1M (not including ancillary benefits like lifetime pensions for jobs that were never performed).
I am not a lawyer, and I have no familiarity with this kind of litigation, but I was surprised at the settlement. It's possible that NYC got spooked by recent high-profile discrimination lawsuit outcomes (jury verdict against Equinox here, settlement with Fox News here), and it's possible the legal fees and likely result of a trial made settling prudent for NYC. But I wonder whether NYC politicians (or bureaucrats) failed to mount a vigorous legal defense out of ideological sympathy for the plaintiffs.
I also don't see how this kind of settlement - available only to failed candidates based on their race - can satisfy an Equal Protection standard. Won't failed white candidates have a discrimination claim?
Anyway, there's no shortage of culture war angles to this story. NYC famously pays $38,000 per public school student / year, with mediocre outcomes; once again the tax payer seems to get a raw deal. There are the perennial issues around disparate racial impact from ostensibly race-blind hiring practices. The NYT doesn't seem to have reported on this, which raises questions about media coverage. And so on.
I want to focus on a different question, though: to what extent (if at all) do such high-profile, lottery-style bonanzas undermine the case for honest, low-paid toil among the working class? I have a pet theory that the seeming arbitrariness of financial success in America (and perhaps other countries) is a major factor (not the only one!) among prime working age men exiting the labor market. Events like this feel deeply unfair - why work your whole life if you can get paid to not work? And nobody wants to participate in a system that's rigged against them.
I think this makes it more rational to avoid honest work by only a negligible amount.
From the perspective of a working class person, the existence of such opportunities is no different from all the other "lottery-style" phenomena that already exist (becoming a reality TV star, famous YouTuber, an actual lottery, etc.)
In this case things happened to work out very nicely for a lot of the plaintiffs, and they received hundreds of thousands dollars without having to perform any labour. However if the bureaucrats had had less progressive sympathies, or anything else had gone wrong, they would just be far worse off than their colleagues who had passed the test and continued to be full time teachers.
Also, reading the article, and the suit (http://www.gulinolitigation.com/docs/DK%20001.pdf), the plaintiffs continued to follow the path of low-paid work even after the class action was filed. And they all seem to have made a sincere attempt to pass the tests ("...Grim recalled hiring private tutors and studying for it during the early 1990s, before failing many times.")
The lawsuit was not a case of lazy people trying to get the money for nothing. They just lacked the aptitude to pass the tests, and continued to work hard for even lower pay/prestige - I believe that they did not (originally) want this, and just wanted to be allowed to teach full time.
"Why get a driver's license when you could go your whole life without ever getting pulled over by the police?"
"Why not smoke when sometimes smokers live to a 100 and non-smokers sometimes get lung cancer anyway?"
The event feels unfair, but mainly in the sense that all situations involving a small probability of an extreme event feel unfair when the extreme event occurs (though obviously there is a racial angle - I think with regards to that, the settlement was genuinely unfair)
I think on average it's still better to go the straightforward path of value-producing labour. This is much more stable, and almost certainly has a higher expected value (As OP notes, and I agree, this case seems pretty unusual, and so such a tactic is unlikely to work out - but I would be open to evidence to the contrary)
No, actually they would have been just as well off as their colleagues, because their colleagues are not full time teachers, their colleagues are people who aren't capable of being teachers. That's what separates this from the various 'tap into the zeitgeist somehow and become an overnight star' lottery professions - those things are lotteries because there is no formal process for joining them. These not-teachers are getting a substantial pay day specifically because they failed the formal process to become a teacher. It doesn't matter how hard they worked at it, it exceeds their capabilities! It's like suing the Olympics for not giving me gold in sprints because I trained every day - which is to say the kind of joke most people wouldn't make because it breaks their ability to suspend disbelief.
Those are both gambles that millions of people made during the 20th century. But the point I think ebrso was making was that working is supposed to be, and has been claimed to be for an exceptionally long time, more lucrative than not working.
I was answering OP's question about whether the existence of cases like these make it that it is now irrational to not try and game the system - my comment was not making any moral judgements on the people in the class action and what they are/are not entitled to.
From that perspective it does make sense to compare them, as you have, to part-time teachers - as both have the same merit.
And my point is that it still is more lucrative to work than to be unemployed.
Here, there weren't any "non-workers", since the plaintiffs in the class action were just incapable of passing the test - but they had the same outcome as a hypothetical teacher who can pass these exams but deliberately flunks to try and file a discrimination settlement.
And this time around, it happens that the competent (Black and Hispanic) teachers would have actually have been better off if they'd flunked the test.
Of course all of these things are gambles, but I chose them as examples because I believe that they are all bad gambles, that they have negative expected utility. I think a rational actor would choose to pass the test (if they have the ability to do so) instead of taking this wild chance.
But to address the separate point you made - that it is unmeritocratic and unfair that the courts and politicians allowed such a situation to occur, in which the general public was forced to subsidise incompetence - I fully agree.
Though I think the behaviour of the plaintiffs was understandable, and I can't honestly say I would have done any differently in their shoes (The only downside of filing such a suit is the massive damage to your reputation caused by being seen as a welfare queen begging for handouts. But a demoted part-time substitute public school teacher has very little to begin with, and doesn't suffer much from losing it)
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