As is noted in some of my other posts, books and articles that study why humans don’t always make economically logical decisions drive me bonkers. Neither the universe nor our own Mother Nature operate in currencies or derivatives. The rules of the economic system are human creations. To me, the question is not why do humans make choices that are uneconomic, but instead why do we prop up a system that drives us to make so many bad decisions?
For example, one of the most important priorities for mammals, including humans, is the care and treatment of our young. Biologically and physically, we can’t reproduce if our children are not taught how to get along in the world.
In our world we rely on two institutions to care for and educate our young: families and schools. As two articles in today’s papers point out, our economic priorities don’t mesh well with our biological imperatives. First, we penalize parents for actually taking care of their children. Taking time off work to care for a new born means not only foregoing a paycheck for a certain amount of time, but it also often means a long term reduction in pay compared to peers who do not take time off to care for the next generation.
In order to allow parents to work and to try to provide a uniformly good (or at least minimal) education for our kids, we turn to schools. We send the kids off to school in the hopes that their teachers are top rate and skillful. Economically, the free market has determined that teaching the next generation is, in fact, a low paying skill. The low pay deters many very skilled people away from teaching, and into productive fields like financial trading and business consulting. In order to lure some more people into the low paying field of teaching, a program was created that forgives a certain amount of student loans for people who teach in high need areas for a couple of years. Only, it turns out, the program can’t afford loan forgiveness anymore. The result, it seems, is a further drain on the resource pool for qualified teachers.
We lay bare our priorities with the way we spend time and the way we spend money. Based on economic criteria, we are willing to throw the next generation onto the street like an unwanted litters of puppy dogs. Maybe that is a great economic decision for the next quarter, but if that is the case, then maybe we should re-evaluate our decision criteria.
