I’ve been thinking a lot about how we pay for the knowledge we use to make life better, and how we have no good way to compensate many who do the most important work. I had lunch today with some of my former co-workers at Verizon Wireless. The gaps in pay between the best teachers and market-equivalent jobs in private industry are enormous — 100% or more in many cases.
Even small incentives to keep people in academia can produce huge results.
Over at a new, interesting blog, “Aspirations of a Joint Doc,” blogger Carpus notes that he’s got approval from NIH for a grant to pay off part of his student loans, if he can find funding and devote 80% of his time to research. It’s supposed to be an incentive to keep this guy working in rheumatology — he saves lives, or reduces pain, or makes life worth living.
And I’d wager that his loan excusal isn’t half of what some companies throw away on projects that waste resources, but pleased a boss somewhere, at some time.
In academia, people are held accountable. In private industry, stockholders rarely hear about it.
So, what’s this big drive to “make teachers accountable?” Hello? Are we even on the same planet?
But I digress. Go give Carpus some traffic at Aspirations of a Joint Doc.
(Did I mention that he reminds me a lot of David Kessler when Kessler was finishing his pediatric residency, and working the Senate Labor Committee? Can’t tell you exactly why, and it’s a gut reaction in any case with no data. Joint doc guys always fascinate me.)
Millard Fillmore's Bathtub 
The relation to private industry is interesting. From my experience, there are two levels of accountability, depending on where on the Totem pole one sits, and to whom you are answering.
Accountability always goes Up, so one must always be able to account for their work to those above them, this is the first level, that of heirarchy. The second level is that of defined goals. The engineer must account to his manager that his time and effort was not wasted, but at worse a learning experience that can be learned from by others and used to make future decisions.
This goal standard carries through up to a certain level on the Totem at which point you reach what is commonly refered to as “Upper Management” at which point the accountability is to the “share holder” or “the board” and the goal changes, they are allowed to make more whimsical decisions as long as “at the end of the day” profit and marketshare are up. They are still held accountable, but the metrics of their accountability have changed.
Because of this, many threads are followed on the whim of upper management, and no one lower on the Totem can judge the decision (for fear of reprise), and so they follow the thread, possibly knowing ahead of time of the improbable failure. This is not to discount all failed projects and failed from the start. Many have good intentions that lead to no producable gain, but such an outcome was an unknown to begin with, and so the gain of such knowledge is acquired. Sometimes the search for one goal leads to developments that spawn their own threads, or help accomplish tasks of others following their own thread. Though I assume such can be the same of academic threads, not all threads that end in failure are failures in the end.
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Glad you’re interesteted. Thanks for the traffic.
And you know, your point is a good one. In the world of NIH and other academic grants, you really do have to show some results if you want to renew the grant or get further funding. You are accountable for your work.
I’m not sure how this applies to public schools, if it does, and I can’t speak for private industry since I have no experience there.
I have to look around your site, now, and find out why I care about Fillmore’s bathtub!
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