Chicago teachers asking for 30% raises over next 2 years

[tpfkaw]

The reason why the cost of living in Chicago is so much higher than in Futtbuck, PA, is because it's considered more desirable to live in Chicago than in Futtbuck.  People will willingly pay more for the "same thing" to live in Chicago rather than in Futtbuck because the resources and opportunities available in a thriving major city dwarf those in depressed rural areas.  $75k will therefore provide you with just about the same standard of living elsewhere - an austere lifestyle where people want to live and a lavish one where people want to leave, which have been judged by the collective body of people to be equivalent.

75% of Americans would love to be making $75k in Chicago, as would quite a few teachers (who are now being graduated from college at three times the rate of new positions opening up, which among normal people would mean salaries in the industry would drop instead of astronomically increasing at the expense of newly-qualified individuals entering the industry, and the taxpayer).

Of course, there's also nothing preventing teachers from (horror upon horrors) living in one of the cheaper suburbs and commuting, like normal people.  If they do insist on living in the city it might in fact be a win-win to reduce their salaries enough that they have to live among the scary brown/black people.  It would certainly be quite the motivator to improve their students' performance, no?

As an aside, Chicago has objectively terrible teachers.  As Stephen Leavitt pointed out in his bestselling book of pop-statistics, Freakonomics, a statistical analysis of standardized test results revealed widespread cheating by teachers - patterns of answers filled out the same way on every test sheet in the class.  Not only that, but many of the answers in those patterns were wrong, unmasking them as not only dishonest and incompetent but also idiots.