The economics of vocation or ‘why is a badly paid nurse a good nurse’?
Section snippets
A simple (in)efficiency wage story
What do we mean when we say that somebody has a ‘vocation’ for nursing (or teaching, or working with the handicapped)? We take it to mean two things, that (a) that person is particularly devoted, going ‘beyond the call of duty’ in doing their job, and (b) they do the job because they like doing it or feel a need to do it (they ‘care’).1
Example: nurses in a monopoly NHS
Suppose there exists a monopoly supplier of health called a National Health Service (NHS).
The supply of nurses is denoted where is the wage and is a job content variable which measures the fraction of a nurses working day spent ‘at the bedside’ () or in direct contact with patients. The rest of a nurse’s day is spent on other tasks not involving direct contact patient care which we label ‘administration’ ().
A nurse without a vocation is assumed indifferent between time spent
Conclusions
This short paper has provided a simple mechanism for why increasing wages paid to workers in vocation-intensive sectors (such as nursing and teaching) may be more costly than just the additional payroll cost. Other things being equal, a lowly paid nurse is more likely to have a vocation, and so over-perform in his role, than a highly paid one. This accords with our intuition that a higher wage may attract the ‘wrong sort’ of person.
The analysis is clearly limited in a number of ways. The
Acknowledgements
I am grateful to Jeff Frank, Craig Brett, Peth Tuppe, Julie Nelson and two referees from this journal for helpful comments, and the ‘Ruby Team’ midwives at St. Peters Hospital, Chertsey, for inspiration.
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