The Magazine  The Privileged Public Sector  Mommas, don’t let
your babies grow up to be ­anything but civil servants.  Sep 20,
2010, Vol. 16, No. 01 • By ANDREW FERGUSON Widget tooltip Single
Page Print Larger Text Smaller Text Alerts  President Obama’s
former budget chief, Peter Orszag, acknowledged the apparent pay
advantage, or pay premium, enjoyed by the feds. But he said the
difference was inflated by the workers’ average education and
skill levels, which are higher in the federal government than in
the private labor force. So the conservative economists Andrew
Biggs and Jason Richwine ran the numbers again, controlling for
the higher educational attainment and skill level of federal
employees. They discovered that federal workers still received a
premium of 24 percent over similarly trained private workers. 
Others have argued that the difference between pay scales has
been inflated by age and seniority: The federal workforce is
older than the private workforce, and the average government
worker has lo