Two psychologists four beers

I admit I may listen to some very niche podcasts. The way to know you are listening to a niche podcast is when the ad placed on the pad is not for the usual mattress or food subscription offer but for an app that helps people design and analyse empirical academic studies. One such podcast that I listen to regularly is Two Psychologists Four Beers where Yoel Inbar and Alexa Tullett discuss the latest interesting papers in social psychology or the latest hot topic in the field. In their episode on 26 October, they talked about a new paper by Bradley Hughes and his colleagues.

The paper in question tries to establish a job classification index that measures the prestige of different jobs. Alexa and Yoel discuss the paper in detail and provide their usual excellent take on the social implications of the results and the limitations of the methodology, so if you have an hour, go listen to the show. The main limitation that I would want to point out is that this occupational prestige index is based on the ratings of 3,113 respondents, some 90% of which were Americans. The occupational prestige identified in the index is thus very American and may well differ significantly in other countries, even if these countries may be relatively similar to the US.

The reason I say this is because some occupations and fields have rather low prestige and I think they may rate higher in some European countries. To give you an idea, the chart below reproduced from the original paper shows the top, middle and bottom 15 jobs in the index.

Jobs with high, average and low occupational prestige

Source: Hughes et al. (2022)

Looking through the list, I had to blush a little to see physicists as part of the top 15 occupations with the highest social prestige. Clearly, we physicists definitely have a more prestigious education and job than almost anyone (just kidding). Similarly, I agree with surgeons and rocket scientists being up there as the most prestigious occupations. I once attended a dinner and was sitting on one of these large dinner tables they have in a hotel ballroom. When we made the introductions, I asked the gentleman opposite me what he did for a living. He said he was a neurosurgeon for children. I never had a more acute feeling of having wasted my life than at that moment.

But where things get a bit murky for me is in the middle section where you find jobs in education and health care (other than qualified doctors). I still don’t understand why in countries like the US, the UK and most of the developed world, we value nurses and teachers so low. Especially here in the UK, we often talk about the productivity puzzle in this country, that is the observation that productivity growth has been much lower than in other developed countries.

To me, one very big contribution to this productivity puzzle is that the UK has chronically underinvested in physical and social infrastructure and in fact is in a much worse state than countries like Germany or France. All of this starts with education. To become more productive, we need a better educated and trained workforce. But how are we going to improve our education system when teachers are not respected in society? I have heard anecdotes that in countries like Finland, teachers are paid much better than in the UK or Germany. I don’t know if that is true, but if you treat your teachers better, I think one can expect to attract people who are better teachers and thus get better outcomes in the education system. And this starts in primary school and goes all the way to universities. In the UK and the US, there are some of the best universities and private schools in the world that provide their students with the best education available. But leave this small group of elite private schools and universities behind and the quality of education drops off sharply.

But what good is the best surgeon in the world trained at the best university if the hospitals are overwhelmed by too many patients and the nurses are not trained sufficiently well or are overworked? What good are the best engineers and physicists in the world trained at a global top 10 university if there aren’t any qualified builders to build the houses or the high-tech applications the engineers designed? If the middle ground of skilled but not academically trained people is not appreciated by society, the great ideas of the highly educated elites will never make it into practice or be implemented in such a slapdash way that there is no gain in productivity.

But to have this group of skilled but not academically trained people, society needs to appreciate the value they provide and businesses and the state need to put resources into training them. The apprenticeship system in Germany and other countries is a good case in point. People don’t have to go to university to get a well-paid and respected job. They train for three years as a nurse, electrician or other skilled occupations. Instead, they get a practical, yet comprehensive education that lasts three years and trains them to be great at these jobs. Take for instance the difference between becoming a cop in the US, the UK and Germany. In the US, training for future cops is on average 21 weeks before they are allowed to go on patrol. In the UK, it is more like two years and in Germany three to four years. Do you think the quality of policing in the US is as high as in the UK or Germany? Do you think the problems the US has with crime and police misconduct are due in part to a lack of training?

This is a universal problem, not just one confined to policing. If society doesn’t appreciate the people doing the hard work, fewer and fewer people will want to do this work and as a result, we all suffer through a lack of infrastructure, long waiting times to get important services and just a general increase in waste of time and effort. In this respect, the occupational prestige index could become an important tool to identify why some countries simply are more productive than others and how societal attitudes towards occupations drive economic fortunes.