Baseball players and movie stars get paid millions of dollars to hit baseballs and act, respectively. We want our kids to be well educated, and we always talk about how valuable public school teachers are, but we don't really want to pay them that much. If the average NYC public school teacher teaches 30-35 students per class, per year x 6-8 classes per year and does that for 10 years, he/she has touched the lives of thousands of young people helping to develop their intellect. What is that worth to society? Apparently, not that much. NYC public school teachers, and inner city school teachers more generally, are paid about $10,000 less than their counterparts in the suburbs - who have smaller classes, more resources, more teacher's aides, etc.. Imagine if we paid the math teacher only 1% of Alex Rodriguez's salary (the math teacher would earn $295,000 per year). Brad Pitt spends 6 weeks working on a movie, has his expenses paid for, and gets paid 25 million dollars for doing so, plus a portion of the films profits from ticket sales and video releases, while Jerry Seinfeld (when his tv show was on NBC) earned 5 million dollars per episode plus royalties every time the show is re-run; Jerry's fellows stars only earned 1 million per episode. NYC starts the average social worker somewhere between 30-35 K per year while overburdening them with a caseload that would make your head spin. Yet we say that protecting children is important. Is there something wrong here?
Discuss this - but use some supply and demand terminology - determinants of each, laws of each, etc., Bring in other examples you can think of - discuss those.