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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.
As an engineering student... defense money is great. Salaries in excess of $200k are common, there's lots of job openings, and I view the whole field as a (morally defunct) money fountain. Of course, this goes hand in hand with the fact that defense spending is a number one source of cost overruns for the government. I don't think that I would want every government agency to be like that.
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I'm not sure teaching is the best example.
There's been a lot of historic success from getting brilliant tutors for up and coming brilliant students. Finding someone impressive to tutor John von Neumann or lecture at Harvard is great, but not really a government employment problem, and basically solved.
Luring someone away from finance to teach in a euphemistically challenging inner city school... this does happen. You mention Teach for America. But... why, though? What are they going to teach? Phonics? Remedial high school algebra? Fractions, attempt 5. Basically college AP classes at a well off high school?
Largely hispanic and working class high schools often like to get people to teach things like culinary arts and shop classes. Sometimes they have trouble with this, because it pays less than being a chef or a mechanic, and they have to pass background checks, and do a bunch of certification nonsense. It would probably make sense to pay these positions more, to the extent that they're difficult to fill. Some states accept some years of industry experience instead of a bachelor's degree for these positions, and that makes sense.
The economy as a whole is, in some sense, a zero sum game, and if you're luring people away from lucrative, high prestige positions working with people like them, to go teach children or teens not much like them, you need to consider why.
Maybe a better case to consider is the military. It used to offer (maybe somewhat still does) 18 year olds camaraderie, structure, a paid college education if suitable, and a chance to attain a higher rank where they were lives are literally at stake. That works, but they seem to be actively trying to alienate their base lately.
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I think your focus on teaching muddles the wider dynamic in government hiring: a significant portion of upper caliber talent isn't strongly financially motivated (this probably applies to teaching as well). In this light, all they can do is offer interesting problems (JPL/Nasa/NSA/arguably a lot of defense contractors) and/or good working conditions. Why should they try and pay 1MM salaries when Wall Street can always outbid them?
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As far as schools, you're probably better off creating solutions that scale than paying teachers better. Even something simple like developing a free version of Saxon Math would be amazing. Eureka Math is free, and for this reason many schools use it, despite it being utterly terrible and (according to teachers I've talked to, as well as common sense given what I know of the curriculum) very quickly leading to obvious decreases in test scores.
I'm sure paying teachers more would help too, but a far more efficient solution is just to make their jobs easier and make their path of least resistance an effective one.
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Real question: does the kind of ‘teacher quality’ that tends to be rewarded with extra pay actually come with better teaching? My priors are very much not that a masters in education actually makes you better at teaching.
This is my impression as well. I attended a well-funded public high school in the US where teachers made roughly what OP is quoting (100k-180k depending on seniority IIRC). A minority (maybe 20%?) of the teachers I encountered stood out noticeably from the kind of teaching quality I'd encountered before that point, i.e. "you would probably have trouble attracting this level of human capital with e.g. a 60k salary, all else being equal," and at least some of them were clearly not in it for the money. A lot of the others were phoning it in or actively bad in ways you would expect to encounter at schools with more normal salaries. I think most of them were coasting on the median quality of the students, which was pretty high. It's really hard for me to confidently say that attending that school (vs one closer to the median) had a significant positive impact on my education or the direction of my life. I definitely wouldn't use my experience to justify the claim "paying teachers 120k instead of 60k is usually worth it on the margin."
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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.
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