That's what I mean, though. There's basically no evidence of valuable learning. Continuous measures of education exposure are consistently insignificant.

Everything seems to be quality signaling and selection bias.

I thought returns to education findings are pretty robust?  It's more that there's a debate about whether it's a signaling story or whether it's actual human capital accumulation?

SimpleStacker

About 4M teachers at $70k vs about 500 professional basketball players at $10M.

So, the teachers are around $300B and the basketball players $10B.

I wasn't sure about that #1 claim, and didn't bother doing extra math/ask AI for numbers, but that was my initial inclination, too.

denlillaapan

Two notes on basketball players vs teachers:

the_stacker_muse

econ

On the Salaries of Basketball Players and Capitalism's Contributions to Society

Two notes on basketball players vs teachers:

1. All the teachers earn more than all the basketball players, which is a better sense of how much society values the two professions.
2. Teachers objectively suck at their jobs, in aggregate. In their defense, it's not clear that their job is even possible to achieve. After decades of being the most heavily studied question in all of economics (and the result researchers are trying to find), there's still no compelling evidence that school has any positive long term effects on human outcomes.