A reader suggested an old blog post on two systems.
In the business system, your status comes from market acceptance. If the market likes your offering, you have high status. To hold onto that status, you must deal with competition. Ultimately, you have to accept the choices that consumers make.
In the other system, which applies to permanent government employees, teachers, and professors, status comes from credentials. You automatically get more money if you have a higher degree. You can acquire tenure, which insulates you from job loss. (During the recent recession, compare the rate of job loss among people in system A with that in system B.) Finally, you operate on the basis of authority. In government, you can force people to obey your edicts. In education, you can force students to take your courses–or, better yet, to pay your salary even though hardly any students enroll in your courses.
There is more at the link, and I probably should have written even more.
This isn’t quite right.
Academia has been moving away from tenure for years and success isn’t simply credentials. There’s tons of competition of various forms including very market structured competition for prizes and grants, and there’s lots of inter-personal politics. The Presidents of the big Universities have some distinguished background, but not necessarily the most impressive PhD degrees. Also, student admissions and grants are determined by highly political processes, not strictly merit competition or credential competition.
In business, lots of companies work on credentials, and most companies strive for monopoly advantage. As Peter Thiel famously says, if you want competition, open a restaurant where you can compete away all of your profits. Business want some unique value or service that gives them a monopoly; you see this in big tech companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple, or Twitter. Also anyone who has ever worked in the medical field, the financial field, the energy and oil and gas field, the insurance field, or the defense contracting field will tell you right away, that none of these areas are the primarily consumer market driven.
Yeah, I think he may be confusing “business” and “government” with “small organizations” and “large institutions”. In a huge institution, including major governments and large corporations, the link between individual performance and institutional success is very weak. Also, large institutions require consistency, which means that decisions are made according to legible criteria (e.g. credentials) rather than local knowledge (are you good at your job?).
In practice, the mayor of a small town may be much more directly subject to competition than an individual with a similar scope of responsibilities (say, a local area manager) in a large corporation.
I’ve been told the status system is for when the market fails: the market won’t get anyone to fight and die at Ypres, so you’ve got to use central authority and patriotism for that job.
Also, we give monopoly power to central authority for efficiency: one postal system; one law enforcement division; etc. This requires playing the status game.
On the real planet Earth, many enterprises are structured in a way that shields the high ranking officers from bankruptcies or responsibilities for wrongdoing in ways that some tweed-coated guy could only dream of.
Going with this schema, we could ask about the “from whom” of status. In one ideal system status is judged by outsiders, in the other by insiders. The former looks to decisions of a larger group than the latter.
If you want to stop government schools, stereotyping all teachers does not seem very effective way of doing so. And the reality is one of the issues of teachers is we compare to society of 1950 -1980s when schools benefitted from private sector sex discrimination. (Realize it lasted longer than 1960s as teachers are generational so it takes 40 years to cycle out of all new teachers.)
1) How would you convince the good teachers (there are plenty) to move away from public schools? If the private sector took all the good teachers then they could beat government schools.
2) One issue of teachers is everybody dislikes the unions but generally like their teachers. (Of my kids teachers I would say 3 are bad, 6 are good/very good, and 5 are fine.)
3) Private school attendance is dropping the last several decades. Why is that? (I suspect less religious schools but it does seem a starting point to analyze.)
If the private sector took all the good teachers then they could beat government schools.
No, they wouldn’t, for the simple reason that once you pass a certain competence (know the material, show up most every day, be a few days ahead of the students in the text), pretty much all teachers are pretty much equally good. Yes, there are certain teachers who will inspire certain students. But for the vast majority of students, the variation between the vast majority of teachers will make no difference in the amount they learn.
I have noticed that left-leaning institutions such as media, entertainment, and academia also share in common a zero-sum game of success. There are essentially a fixed number of tenured positions, inches of print space, hours of screen time, number of leading movie roles, etc. So participants in these industries grow up thinking of success as zero-sum rather than the positive sum game that obtains in market and trade environments.
That may be the perception but there was a time, roughly the 1960s, when the baby boomers were reaching college age, that the number of tenured positions went up substantially.
And today, with the proliferation of cable networks and streaming services with original programming, the number of roles (and the number of paying jobs for actors) is up considerably.