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The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

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Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#61

Post by decimalenough »

tptacek wrote: post #21
jfengel wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of it has to do with the perceived righteousness of publishing. A lot of those jobs involve holding people's hands, "emotional labor", like nursing and teaching. These jobs are seen as something people (women, mostly) should do because they like being carers, rather than for the money. These jobs end up being paid less than they are really worth, especially since they often involve many hours without compensatio…

Nursing and teaching are surprisingly well-compensated fields with lots of job security and relatively straightforward entrance requirements. It's also true that both fields are valorized, but plumbing isn't and has the same dynamics. These arguments are all overdetermined.

This depends wildly on the country, but in many, public school teachers are criminally underpaid.

Nursing is also a hard job where the paycheck is nowhere near what doctors can earn.

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#62

Post by tptacek »

wisty wrote: post #60
beedeebeedee wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That may be true elsewhere, but not in the US

Not hugely so. Teaching isn't paid megabucks but that's partly because it's a market for lemons - it's hard to tell a good one from a bad one (and people don't even agree in what it means to be educated, are facts or "critical thinking" more important, how about discipline vs temporary comfort) so there's no high paid super stars. There is a stereotype that teachers are low paid. Somewhat .... but there's a slight pr…

Outside of low-population rural school districts, the idea that teachers are poorly paid --- at least for the last 30 years or so --- comes from people not understanding the value of a defined-benefit pension plan (and, if you want to go that far, that people don't understand the interplay between an annual salary and a huge number of days off work).

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#63

Post by mold_aid »

tptacek wrote: post #31
mold_aid wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Almost certain OP is referring to the fact that nurses and teachers are not well-paid or respected in the US, which I'd like to note as well. Despite this, Public Health as a pseudo-STEM major nearly ranks with STEM fields in general for majors seen as "workplace-ready." Maybe there are too many English majors (I honestly think the supply of careers is too low). But I think the "supply is greater than the demand" is…

If the claim is "nurses and teachers are poorly paid in the US", that claim is broadly false. K-12 teachers in major metro areas in the US have surprisingly generous comp packages: well above area median take-home salary with predictable ladders, very good benefits, and defined-benefit pension plans . There are school districts where teachers are poorly compensated, but they aren't the norm over the population as a w…

>that claim is broadly false.

No, sorry, no, it is not "broadly false." K-12 salaries enter at average 40k often with a requirement to enter a graduate program within five years. I don't see that teachers in most states have received substantial increases in salary over any considerable period. They are underpaid.

Compensation rates are not "surprisingly good" (surprisingly?). Both groups merit much higher compensation. Your subjective consideration of "well-compensated" may differ from mine and fair enough, but I find generally one's position is more an index of their political beliefs (or sentiments towards unions in general) than any objective standard of what is "surprising" ("a retirement plan? In this economy?).

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#64

Post by tptacek »

mold_aid wrote: post #63
tptacek wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the claim is "nurses and teachers are poorly paid in the US", that claim is broadly false. K-12 teachers in major metro areas in the US have surprisingly generous comp packages: well above area median take-home salary with predictable ladders, very good benefits, and defined-benefit pension plans . There are school districts where teachers are poorly compensated, but they aren't the norm over the population as a w…

>that claim is broadly false. No, sorry, no, it is not "broadly false." K-12 salaries enter at average 40k often with a requirement to enter a graduate program within five years. I don't see that teachers in most states have received substantial increases in salary over any considerable period. They are underpaid. Compensation rates are not "surprisingly good" (surprisingly?). Both groups merit much higher compensati…

You can just pick a city and Google median/mean salary for their school district to see that this isn't true. For what it's worth, the median cash compensation salary in my own high school district is six figures.

The smirking "a retirement plan" comment you made leaves out the important bit: it's a defined-benefit plan. The point isn't that teachers shouldn't have defined-benefit pensions. The point is that those pensions are extremely valuable, and not at all a market-rate perk in the broader economy.

It's easy to win an argument with a straw man saying "teachers are overcompensated". It'll be harder for you to contend with the argument I'm actually making.

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#65

Post by mold_aid »

tptacek wrote: post #64
mold_aid wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>that claim is broadly false. No, sorry, no, it is not "broadly false." K-12 salaries enter at average 40k often with a requirement to enter a graduate program within five years. I don't see that teachers in most states have received substantial increases in salary over any considerable period. They are underpaid. Compensation rates are not "surprisingly good" (surprisingly?). Both groups merit much higher compensati…

You can just pick a city and Google median/mean salary for their school district to see that this isn't true. For what it's worth, the median cash compensation salary in my own high school district is six figures. The smirking "a retirement plan" comment you made leaves out the important bit: it's a defined-benefit plan. The point isn't that teachers shouldn't have defined-benefit pensions. The point is that those pe…

I'm not sure what argument you are making, but the opinion you expressed initially was:

>Nursing and teaching are surprisingly well-compensated fields

To which somebody else said:

Not in the US!

And no, they aren't. And they're not "valorized." If salaries are surprising ito you, and if you say that doesn't mean "teachers are overcompensated," ok!, but I'm not sure where the argument with this straw man occurred. I know what the median salaries and general entry salaries for teachers are for my city, because I work with them (though not a k-12 teacher myself), I understand the debt calculations they have to make to continue, and I do not think they are well-paid.

But I did take your advice to google it and now I would say that teachers' incomes are described as "comparatively low" or "lagging behind cost increases" or "not keeping up with the rate of inflation" because in the results I see phrases like that quite a bit. So I wouldn't say that "surprisingly well-compensated" is actually true, and that "poorly paid" is "broadly false." In one relavant case I read "the 'benefits advantage' is not sufficiently large to offset the growing wage penalty for teachers."

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#66

Post by aworks »

com2kid wrote: post #44
chromacity wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It probably has to do with the fact that we condition children and adolescents to consider white-collar jobs as more noble than blue-collar jobs, then we tell them that to get a good white-collar job, they need a degree... and then we make STEM degrees hard by subjecting students to more math than most people realistically need. So we have a lot of frontend developers who know calculus and an oversupply of people wit…

Calculus is required for English degrees in other countries. Heck a lot of countries require some amount of calculus just to graduate high school. Same goes for the basics of statistics. A basic understanding of statistics is a requirement for any college degree in many countries, and for good reasons. Stats comes up all the damn time. From proper A/B testing, to marketing, to understanding public health emergencies,…

I understand the value of statistics. But calculus? I say this, as someone who took 6 semesters of calculus in college.

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#67

Post by tptacek »

mold_aid wrote: post #65
tptacek wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can just pick a city and Google median/mean salary for their school district to see that this isn't true. For what it's worth, the median cash compensation salary in my own high school district is six figures. The smirking "a retirement plan" comment you made leaves out the important bit: it's a defined-benefit plan. The point isn't that teachers shouldn't have defined-benefit pensions. The point is that those pe…

I'm not sure what argument you are making, but the opinion you expressed initially was: >Nursing and teaching are surprisingly well-compensated fields To which somebody else said: Not in the US! And no, they aren't. And they're not "valorized." If salaries are surprising ito you, and if you say that doesn't mean "teachers are overcompensated," ok!, but I'm not sure where the argument with this straw man occurred. I k…

"People enter the profession of teaching for reasons other than altruism".

In a given metro, you can simply look up the median income, then look up the median teacher's income --- it'll be higher, and that's before benefits.

I think it's good we compensate teachers well. I think it's bad that people don't understand how valuable defined-benefit pensions are, because they are an enormous component of state income taxes and, especially, property taxes --- property taxes are regressive, and promote a cycle of housing exclusion in areas of opportunity. If you think a defined-benefit pension is akin to a 401K, or that a private sector employee could reasonably expect to get one, I'd suggest you maybe read up a bit.

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#68

Post by com2kid »

aworks wrote: post #66
com2kid wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Calculus is required for English degrees in other countries. Heck a lot of countries require some amount of calculus just to graduate high school. Same goes for the basics of statistics. A basic understanding of statistics is a requirement for any college degree in many countries, and for good reasons. Stats comes up all the damn time. From proper A/B testing, to marketing, to understanding public health emergencies,…

I understand the value of statistics. But calculus? I say this, as someone who took 6 semesters of calculus in college.

6 semesters seems like... a lot? IIRC getting a math undergrad at my Uni didn't require that many classes of calc.

I think calc 1 and 2 are extremely valuable. The concept of rate of change is fundamental to so many things in life, and understanding "area under the curve" is essential to understanding how many ideas are communicated, including lots of graphs in physics, chemistry, and economics.

Beyond that I feel calculus starts getting into specific applications and is less generally applicable to the populace at large.

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#69

Post by aworks »

com2kid wrote: post #68
aworks wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I understand the value of statistics. But calculus? I say this, as someone who took 6 semesters of calculus in college.

6 semesters seems like... a lot? IIRC getting a math undergrad at my Uni didn't require that many classes of calc. I think calc 1 and 2 are extremely valuable. The concept of rate of change is fundamental to so many things in life, and understanding "area under the curve" is essential to understanding how many ideas are communicated, including lots of graphs in physics, chemistry, and economics. Beyond that I feel ca…

6 quarters, not 6 semesters!

Decades later, I wish I had more linear algebra.

Re: The most-disliked people in the publishing industry

#70

Post by FiatLuxDave »

ggreer wrote: post #28
jfengel wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The Martian was published in 2011. There are vanishingly few like it since then. Sometimes a book gets picked up purely on its merits. (It helps to appeal to a wealthy target audience.) But on average you'd get richer by getting a minimum wage job and spending it all on lottery tickets.

The Martian is an outlier in its success, but it's far from the only instance of successful self-published sci-fi. Recent examples I've read include The Powers of Earth [1] by Travis Corcoran and Theft of Fire by Devon Eriksen. In both cases, the authors quit their day jobs (I think both worked in software) and are now full time writers. 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Powers_of_the_Earth

Nice to see a reference to Theft of Fire here. I really liked it and can't wait for the sequel.
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