On 2013-12-28 11:14, LobowolfXXX wrote:
It's not about market value or social value. It's about job scarcity.

On 2013-12-28 11:53, LobowolfXXX wrote:

But again, how is that circular? Of the millions of people who have played football - or even the millions or hundreds of thousands who have played quarterback - he's one of the hundred or so best in the country. That's the only reason he has this job. The three hundredth best quarterback in the country doesn't have a job. The thirty thousandth best teacher does.

On 2013-12-28 13:03, LobowolfXXX wrote:
I think it's your analysis that's incorrect. It's when you restrict the analysis to professionals that the reasoning becomes circular. Naturally, if you analyze any profession by comparing only the people in that profession to each other, there will be good, bad, and average practitioners; however, that's not the point. By weeding out well over 99% of the people who aspire and train to be professional football players, the NFL (and other sports leagues) create a very exclusive talent pool. There are, in other words, "bad professional football players," e.g. players who are bad by professional standards, but there are not "bad football players" (or even average ones, or even merely 'good' ones) who ever bcome professionals in the first place.

There are many, many people who teach both professionally and non-professionally; "potential teachers," if you will. The question is, how many who teach get to become paid professionals - quite a few. So many, in fact, that many people who don't do it particularly well get lifelong jobs in the field.

There are many, many people who play football both professionally and non-professionally; only the very best of the best will ever do so in the NFL.

My point is, in fact, supported by your own post about the relatively low barriers to entry in the teaching profession. It's natural that those low barriers to entry result in not-particularly-good professionals.

Even restricting the discussion to those within the profession would support the validity of my point. I'd suggest that the distribution of teaching ability (granting that such a thing as "teaching ability" cannot be easily quantified, but taking on faith that it exists) is distributed among professional teachers along what roughly resembles a bell curve. The most common teacher out there is the person in the middle - that is, most teachers possess an average amount of teaching ability as compared to their peers. There are about as many pretty good teachers as pretty bad ones, and comparatively few and equal numbers of great and terrible ones.

That's not the case the NFL. The most common player out there is the bad - by NFL standards - player. Is the guy who's just above the replacement level, a half-step away from not having a job. That's why NFL careers are so short. Football playing talent (this holds true for all professional sports) is NOT distributed among NFL players along a bell curve. As football playing ability increases in the NFL, the quantity of players with at level of talent decreases (as opposed to teachers, or any sort of bell curve where the quantity increases as you approach the center, THEN decreases). That's because in the NFL, you're dealing with a higher talent pool. The entire pool itself is already at the far right end of the bell curve.