Mike has been writing about the pay gap, but his only commentary on Andrew Biggs’s work is the following:

I haven’t found anyone making the case that the public sector workers in Wisconsin are overpaid. Andrew Biggs of AEI, who watches public sector compensation closely replicates data and research done by EPI concludes: “At the end of the day, I just don’t think we can make any final conclusions on state/local pay [in Wisconsin] because so much of the data, particularly on the benefits end, is still too loosey-goosey. There’s just more work to be done.” Mind you, that’s the strongest attack by a conservative wonk using the data I can find: it’s too tough to tell one way or the other. Given that the teacher’s unions are willing to take a hit on benefits, their position is actually to the right than AEI’s.

Mike’s post on average teacher salaries in Wisconsin, which I responded to in this space, reached a number of conclusions that I found unsound, and it reminds me of why Biggs’s humility seems pretty appropriate. One wishes that the folks at EPI, and those who cite them, felt the same way.

But let’s look at what Biggs actually wrote in that post:

At the end of the day, I just don’t think we can make any final conclusions on state/local pay because so much of the data, particularly on the benefits end, is still too loosey-goosey. There’s just more work to be done. (At the federal level, though, the measured overpayment is so large that I’m willing to say I’m convinced.)

Moreover, this came after a great deal of evidence — quite a bit stronger than the evidence Mike cited on average teacher salaries, which, as David Cay Johnston has carefully explained is far less relevant than total compensation — suggesting that there is a large compensation gap. Some of the data is loosey-goosey, e.g., retiree health benefits vary in value. Counting pensions benefits actually received seems far less loosey-goosey. And while making real-world firm size comparisons is necessarily subjective, so is deciding that all public employees in Wisconsin would otherwise be working for the nation’s largest for-profit firms rather than for small businesses.

Mike then quotes Ed Kilgore suggesting that people who want public sector managers to have more autonomy are Ayn Randian producerists, which is … interesting.