This is on point. I'm Megna Chakrabardi. Why are lawyers paid more than teachers?

Really, I'm asking you, why do you think lawyers generally are paid more than teachers?

Is it because lawyers are more valuable? I mean, let's just presume for a moment that salaries

are a pretty good proxy for value. After all, that's one of the fundamental precepts of

market-based systems, right? You get paid, what you're worth to an organization. You get paid

based on your value. So if we zoom out a bit, we could say that different kinds of jobs are paid

what they're worth to the society they serve. That's the presumption for the moment.

So given that, let's look up some numbers. The federal bureau of labor statistics has a fantastic

website. And if you go to BLS.gov and you look up lawyers, you'll see that in 2021, the median

salary for an attorney in the United States, median salary, okay, was $127,000. Well, I should say

more specifically, $127,990. So remember, that's median salary across the whole country, the middle

of what lawyers get paid, $127,990. Okay, so now let's look up teachers. The Bureau of Labor

Statistics says that in that same year, 2021, the median salary for American high school teachers was

$61,820. For elementary school teachers, it was $61,350 median salary again. So in both cases,

though, for teachers, the median salary in this country is less than half the median salary

for lawyers. So why is that? Going back to our initial presumption that pay is a proxy for value,

are we the collective we here in the United States saying that lawyers are twice as valuable as

teachers? Are we saying that what teachers do is worth half of what a lawyer does? Now, I'm not

saying that lawyers are not valuable to society. Shakespearean quotes aside, okay, I'm not saying that,

but what I'm asking is why are they getting paid twice as much is what they're doing,

how they're performing, the very purpose of their jobs, their level of execution in those jobs,

is that all really twice as good, twice as valuable as what teachers do.

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