...the highest paid professions in society.
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"...it is also a standard result that in a competitive equilibrium, the factors of production are paid the value of their marginal product. That is, each person’s income reflects the value of what he contributed to society’s production of goods and services."
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The services of pre-school teachers, mothers and janitors provide the very highest contribution "to society's production of goods and services." Think of a society in which children are abandoned to fend for themselves at birth and in which no one cleans up the messes that others make. Society would soon collapse. Our society is almost entirely built on the backs of these very low paid (or unpaid) people. What would it matter what anyone else does, from CEOs, real estate agents and computer technicians on up to grade school, high school and college teachers, if NO ONE provided loved, cared for human beings to replace the "factors" in the human industrial machine and NO ONE swept the garbage out of our offices, factories, classrooms and homes!
Chaos!
The key to Mankiw's Big Lie, of course, is the phrase "their marginal product." What could be more "marginal" than an iPhone in the pocket of an illiterate. He/she might be able to figure out how to turn it on, then what? More pertinent still, an unloved, uncared for illiterate, if he/she survives babyhood in a society in which no one gives a frack whether he/she does or not, won't ever be able to afford an iPhone because such a person will not likely ever hold a job, open a bank account, get credit, save money. So WHO starts our babies off on a path toward literacy, usefulness and social progress? Who HELPS them, often gratuitously (out of their loving hearts) to be safe and secure and to develop their brains, physical coordination and personalities in those critically important early years?
Jeez, it's so obvious!
And how would these babies and young children fare in an environment full of filth and human waste and trash? How would ANYBODY fare in such an environment? The floors of nurseries covered with feces? The floors of hospitals covered with blood, feces and body parts? Offices with mountains of discarded paper, coffee grounds, half empty soda cans, old pizza and broken computer parts? Factories with industrial dust swirling round as on the wind-swept Sahara? Neighborhoods piled with garbage of every description? Supermarkets with old food, broken packages, mud from many shoes and god knows what-all littering the floors?
Who should be paid the most? Who? Whose "product" is "marginal" in this REAL picture of modern life?
The truth: Modern life WOULD NOT EXIST if it weren't for these lowest paid, most despised and most productive contributors. We can do without almost any other given profession--the least necessary of all being CEOs--but I would give our society months, and maybe just weeks, to total implosion, without parents (didn't mean to dis the dads or other child care givers), pre-school teachers and janitors (and garbage collectors).
Turn this thing upside down and pay them THE MOST--that's what I say. And put all the CEOs and Reaganite economists in jail. Criminals, the lot of them. Empty their pockets first. Hang them by their toes and let their dinero "trickle down" by force of gravity.
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