Would Sandberg have been so dedicated to the institution had he not made millions in it? Maybe. But baseball is far too respected given its spotted history of cheats and over-paid egomaniacs.
Important and meaningful institutions like teaching and medicine are filled with individuals who will not be getting a bailout or make millions like baseball players or bankers. Most true adherents to vaulted institutions are individualist chiefly educated in the "liberal" studies that Brooks pans.
In fact, JP Morgan (a liberal individualist), is seen as the savior of US 19th century banking after a crisis that is eerily similar to today's. Brooks' claim that "there is another, older way of living" rings hollow because educated liberals did not destroy even older institutions like the Magna Carta or the Enlightenment over the last eight years.
A nation in crisis should ask where have all the liberal individuals gone and not lament the status of institutional group think.
I suspect that that if we could measure great teachers and great doctors to the extent that we measure great ballplayers, there would be orders of magnitude improvement in their salaries as well. Baseball is a market economy like any other.
If I had the skills to play professional baseball, I certainly would. The problem though isn't that the money isn't good in the minors. You can make 100k/year in AAA. It's that their careers are so short and their skills are highly in demand. Unless you make it to the big leagues and stick for more than six years, you still need to find another profession.
The reason professional ballplayers make more, is that they compete in a winner-take-all environment. Thanks to televison, baseball playing is now "scalable." The world only needs ~500 pro baseball players to satisfy its baseball entertainment needs.
When we can make doctors scale like that, there will be a few doctors making billions each. Teachers can scale by writing books, and they sometimes make millions.
Orders of magnitude? Are you arguing that the only thing standing between the best 2nd grade teacher in Harlem and millions is an efficient means of measuring talent?
Major League Baseball is certainly not a market economy like any other - it is a federally-protected monopoly, or American Institution if you like.
If we could the quality of teachers with the precision that we measure baseball players, then yes, the best teachers could make millions teaching the children of the super-rich. Additionally, colleges would pay a premium to have the top teachers if they were measured by a universally acknowledged standard. You have to remember that there would only be a few hundred of them.
I also expect that if you could educate a child with the best teachers, you would reliably get very effective adults.
History is littered with geniuses whose students went on to make groundbreaking discoveries as well.
Important and meaningful institutions like teaching and medicine are filled with individuals who will not be getting a bailout or make millions like baseball players or bankers. Most true adherents to vaulted institutions are individualist chiefly educated in the "liberal" studies that Brooks pans.
In fact, JP Morgan (a liberal individualist), is seen as the savior of US 19th century banking after a crisis that is eerily similar to today's. Brooks' claim that "there is another, older way of living" rings hollow because educated liberals did not destroy even older institutions like the Magna Carta or the Enlightenment over the last eight years.
A nation in crisis should ask where have all the liberal individuals gone and not lament the status of institutional group think.