In the meantime....

While Noah recuperates, I'll be taking over this blog in a brilliant coup for my own diabolical purposes filling in with Chris to make sure Noah's loyal readers (all six of you) aren't bored. To wit, here's an article Noah would recommend if he weren't incapacitated. Joseph Stiglitz lays out how we got here, and what we could have done differently. He is especially harsh on the decision to replace Paul Volcker with Alan Greenspan as chairman of the Fed:

The Fed controls the money spigot, and in the early years of this decade, he turned it on full force. But the Fed is also a regulator. If you appoint an anti-regulator as your enforcer, you know what kind of enforcement you’ll get. A flood of liquidity combined with the failed levees of regulation proved disastrous.

I'm not Noah, and I'm not particularly qualified to analyze Stiglitz's assumptions, but his reasoning appears sound to me. There's a reason he's the most cited economist in the world. I promise in the coming days to post on some issues which I do feel qualified to comment on, but for now, make your own judgements.

Also, in Noah's absence, I feel it's my duty to keep you all abreast Yglesias' recent musings. He's been on a trip to Finland recently, and finds a lot to love in the Finnish system.

Teaching is held in high regard not just in the abstract, but in practice as a profession a lot of people want to get into. Consequently, the teaching programs are quite selective. And the selectivity itself makes teaching prestigious since everyone knows teachers are graduates of selective programs. Which helps make going into teaching seem appealing to a lot of people. And so on and so forth in an interesting way. It seems to me that it’s easy to see how it’s socially beneficial to increase the number of talented people who want to be teachers; by contrast, it’s difficult for me to see what kind of social benefits from from increasing the number of talented people who want to be lawyers. Finland and the United States seem to be on different spots on the teacher/lawyer curve, and I don’t think it’s difficult to say which is the better spot.

Personally, I would agree that one of the unintended consequences of the conservative war on public education has been a drop in the prestige of teaching careers, but that's hardly the best argument for why teaching is not attracting good people.

Teaching has always been low on the priority list of the best and brightest in this country; more attractive during economic hard times, sure, but in long periods of growth and prosperity fewer talented people want to opt for the lower pay and relative thanklessness (and these days, with attacks on teacher tenure, lack of job security) of public school teaching. In many parts of the country, teaching (especially early-childhood education) was "woman's work", employing unmarried women or providing secondary salaries to married women to supplement the money their husbands made at "real" jobs.

Raising the prestige of teaching would attract better people, sure, but that may be putting the cart before the horse. Raising the pay of teachers, and tacking on better benefits (perhaps with some modified form of tenure to allow the guarantee of good teachers' jobs while weeding out bad teachers early) would raise the viability of teaching as a primary career for people with good educations, and by doing so, would in turn raise the prestige level of teaching and (hopefully) encourage more talented people to consider teaching as an option.

Talk amongst yourselves. Maybe after a few of these, Noah will be ready to come back and wrest control of his precious blog from the pro-teacher tenure usurper.