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Around 1800 in England and Russia, the three main do-gooder activities were medicine, school, and alms (= food/shelter for the weak, such as the old or crippled). Today the three spending categories of medicine, school, and alms make up ~40% of US GDP, a far larger fraction than in 1800. …
Foragers who personally taught kids, cared for sick folks, and gave food/shelter to weak folks, credibly signaled their loyalty to allies, at least when such needy were allies. Weak group selection helped encourage such aid as ways to signal loyalty. … [Today,] votes supporting spending taxes on medicine, school and alms are interpreted as showing loyal “caring” for one’s community. (more)
Today, two of these three classic charities have very powerful associated “professions”: doctors and teachers. These professions are powerful because they are seen as representing the good in those causes – doctors are our official authorities on what is good for patients, and teachers are our official authorities on what is good for students. So we tend to back these experts when they fight with other related organizations, such as when docs fight with insurance companies, or when teachers fight with mayors. This allows such experts to be very well paid and pampered relative to other professionals.
The missing group here is alms experts: we have no strong profession of those who specialize in helping the poor, crippled, etc. While there are of course people who specialize in such roles, they are not united together under a single recognized label to leverage public sympathy, and they do not speak as a unit, or negotiate as a unit with related organizations.
But, given the example of docs and teachers, it seems plausible that if alms experts were to create an encompassing profession of “feeders”, and if they as a unit publicly challenged other related organizations, like charities or government funders, this feeding profession could often get their way. Of course they’d probably mostly use their power to benefit themselves. To guess if they would help the world, ask yourself if organized docs and teachers help the world.
Even so, there does seem to be an as yet largely unused opening for a feeding profession.
The Alms Expert Opening
I was thinking the same. Perhaps in times past (and in some countries, to this day) it was organized religion.
But in modern secular democracies it is - without a doubt - politicians (Food stamps, social security, medicare, medicaid). And they are very well organized, extremely pampered and they tend to win most fights with other groups.
That is a gross underestimate of how much time teachers actually spend working. Teachers have to spend a significant amount of time outside of school on grading. While this is not a rigorous survey, the total working hours I have generally heard from teachers I know is 50 hours / week (10 hours / day) when school is in session, for a total of 180 * 10 = 1800 hours per year. Add in-service days (days when teachers come to school for meetings, etc. but students don't come in) and a couple weeks of meetings and preparation at the start of the year, and the total is probably ~1900.According to BLS statistics, the average teacher earns $55.7k / yr (the data is at http://www.bls.gov/oes/curr... I took a weighted average of all non-special ed kindergarten, elementary, middle and high school teachers), for an average of $29.31, very close to the college-educated median that you cite.