“It’s not that your wages are low, things are just too expensive.”
High end knife shops hurting the industry.
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“It’s not that your wages are low, things are just too expensive.”
M1k3
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Yeah, because European countries with high wages and taxes totally killed off McDonald's or a Big Mac is 20 euros 
Jovidah
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Not to get overly political but the poor exchange rate of the dollar a couple of years ago had a lot to do with negative perceptions, especially internationally, of the previous administration. Just like poor performance of the euro now is the direct result of strategic blunders by European leaders betting on Russia as a reliable and sane energy supplier.
A lot of the inflationary pressure we see now however are a result of the post-corona hickups trying to restart the economy and some delusional maniac starting a war of genocidal agression in Europe; neither are events politicians in the west really had any agency in (regardless of who’d be in power right now).
This is probably not the right avenue for a discussion on the justness of wage disparity but I think these statements are at least highly debatable. Why shouldn’t someone working in a restaurant kitchen or working as a cleaner, garbageman or agricultural laborer deserve a better wage? Is their investment of time and effort somehow not worthy? Most of these ‘unskilled jobs’ are far less satisfactory to perform, have worse working conditions, often have worse hours...
Is a human being less worthy just because he was born in the wrong place, to the wrong parents, or simply unlucky enough to be born with less intellect?
Would you trade with their job even if the wage was the same?
I understand there are certain economics at play that result in this outcome, but that’s a different thing altogether from argueing it’s a just and desirable outcome.
user 16756
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I have an advanced degree from a top 25 program and I have rather a lot of commits to a product that probably about half of this forum either currently uses or has used in the past.
I am sympathetic, humans bias makes us overrate the role of our own "hard work" in our success, and it is hard to confront the reality that our comparatively very high paying jobs are more happenstance than us getting some reward. But it's the truth. We do not deserve to exploit people just because our skills happen to line up with $ just out of luck. If you need to keep that worldview to sleep at night, I mean I cant stop you, and unfortunately understanding the reality of the economic system in which we participate as is revealed by actual evidence and statistics can cause a good deal of anguish.
Inflation and energy prices hurting the poor? Absolutely. But the actual economic evidence is that currently it is not wage pressure that is causing inflation. It is profit margins and consolidation of companies into fewer entities who are extracting record rents. You can keep going back to the same disproven well if you like, but at some point don't you get tired of saying the same things you've been saying for your whole life and yet no matter how many times we try and go with those things they never work?
BTW, if SWE is soooooooooo difficult like you suggest, how can it be that someone you think is so bad at economics and doesn't know anything about it can move from stats work into ml engineering and then client engineering while still doing stats work at companies with hundreds of millions/billions in revenue? Or maybe it was just hard for you?
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deskjockey
Senior Member
(Edit: for what it's worth I do believe a janitor or cashier deserves the same lifestyle as your sister. Those jobs suck and should be more appreciated.)
So someone mopping floors and scrubbing toilets deserves the same wages as someone who spent years getting an education along with the expense and lost wages as a skilled nurse? Lets be honest, these jobs along with cashiers have different values to society.
I'm not saying a janitor doesn't deserve a good wage but, I also don't think a grade school janitor deserves a >$100K salary. Maybe that why a lot of states can't or don't pay teachers a reasonable wage?
I'm intrigued. How do you go about measuring such a thing? How do you derive a set of metrics without the whole enterprise devolving into an infinite regress?
deskjockey
Senior Member
You can argue it is right or wrong but, my time on the farm did not pay well so I chose college and got a STEM education and reaped a bigger and more consistent paycheck. Whether my quality of life is bettor or worse is open for debate.
Market forces determine what is a fair wage in most cases in the Western world and if someone finds their wage is too low can do something about it to move on to a higher paying job, within reason. My nephew did just that and now makes $42/hr as an electrician and he didn't need years of college and lost wages to get what I personally consider a good hourly wage.
I didn't miss sweating and choking on dust 7 days a week from sunrise to sundown on the farm but, I did miss the rural life when I lived in a windowless cube farm. Loosing sunlight and the joys of a watching cows nurse and graze on a great pasture was missed but, the money I made let me travel to places I would have been able to afford to on the farm and I got real time off for a real vacation; sorry going to farm or stock show is not a vacation for a farmer or cattleman.
user 16756
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Not that hard really. Plus, you can look at two people in different sectors with the same skillset that can be paid dramatically different wages; why does a professor of computer science make about 1/5th of what a comparatively skilled individual at FAANG does, even in the same city?
Wages are driven by a lot of things, productivity/skill/deserve all rank low.
In fact, if you find yourself using the word "deserve", you're in completely the wrong universe.
deskjockey
Senior Member
Yes, serendipity can play a role for some people and in some situations but, that is generally isolated in my experience. However, I have seen what you suggest.
Yes, the FANG companies are the modern day STANDARD OIL. Use to be it was Walmart killing mom'n'pop stores on main street. Now, it is companies like Amazon and Facebook/Meta and people like Bezos and Zuckerberg.
Whether you agree or disagree to the effects, social media manipulation is allowing people like Zuckerberg and 'bad actors' like Russia and China to steer public debate to further their own personal interests at the expense of everyone else. I wouldn't mind as much if it didn't silence such a large segment of society. Free will means other people are allowed to make different choices and I don't see that much these days with COVID mandates and political and financial power concentration into a relatively small group of people.
deskjockey
Senior Member
Wages and productivity are out of whack in the global sense. Wages are suppressed by the cost of production overseas so, that is part of the divergence.
Regarding why two people doing the same job in different field don't get the same wage? Sometimes it is simply because one job has non-financial benefits.
I worked one job where it was literally like, I can't believe they pay me to do this! I worked another job making comparatively little because my boss and coworkers made working where I did an absolute joy everyday - I literally looked forward to the drive into work because I was going to be with all the people that made my life so enjoyable! Truly awesome people to work with. I left it for a 50% pay raise and had a lot more money but, was not nearly as happy and moved on trying to capture the "low pay" environment I had before.
After the basic necessities are covered, more money buys more things but, not more happiness in my experience. Nice vacations and housing helped but, it didn't make up for the worse work environment. Today I make 25% of what I did but, my personal happiness is orders of magnitude greater. Chasing a dollar beyond what is needed for basic necessities took me to places I didn't really enjoy.
deskjockey
Senior Member
Sorry, I didn't go to Rome on Munich for a Big Mac!Yeah, because European countries with high wages and taxes totally killed off McDonald's or a Big Mac is 20 euros
If I earned EU wages and had EU benefits, a 20€ Big Mac would be reasonable. The Europeans I knew also did not treat McDonald's as a primary meal source either. Personally, I preferred a Doner Kebab at the train station or their version of a strip mall.
Switzerland is better example of the egregious cost of things combined with a really high hourly wage IMHO
I clearly have some reading to do in this area.
Just simplify though, you're saying that the upper echelons of financial success in a given field are dictated by elements that exist outside of that domain, and independently (and perhaps arbitrarily?) of the time/skill/labor/effort required to achieve a given degree of productivity within that field? Also that employees are not paid in relation to their productive output?
Could the divergence in the data on that graph be accounted for (at least in part) by technological and methodological advancements that just make companies that much more productive per employee?
And I get the feeling you haven't got a 40 year company employee that worked up from the ground floor to management in mind at all either?
“Deserve” is a dirty word in this context, imo. It implies a sort of objective judgement about someone’s worth. It’d be more accurate and less obnoxious to talk about jobs that our current economy values more/less, for better or worse. But even that doesn’t really capture income inequality… there are plenty of high paying jobs that seem to have little societal value other than making money for the person working in that position.
I assume @tcmx3’s point about happenstance is that some percentage of the population is much more able to invest the time and money (e.g. on education) to get a high paying job than the rest of the population. It takes resources to invest in yourself! People who aren’t able to do that do not work less hard — often they end up working harder just to make a reasonable living. That baker making croissants is probably working just as hard as the software engineer making 10x as much money. In particular, when we start saying “software engineering is harder than baking” be aware that what we actually mean is that it takes a greater up front investment to become a software engineer than a baker, not that the actual work is harder once you’ve acquired the necessary skillset. (You may argue that a smaller percentage of people have the “talent” to become software engineers vs bakers, or something, but even that I’d argue is more a result of opportunity and training.)
Anyway, I’m not an economist, so I have no idea how to solve these problems, but it’s clear to me from looking at other countries than the US that there are more equitable solutions available. There’s also this tendency to say “well, this is what the market wants” as if it excuses not caring about the people involved. If the market wants to pay some people 1000x more than other people, and decides that some people should work themselves to death just trying to make enough to live, maybe we shouldn’t operate within such a market? It’s a choice we’re all making to have the world work like this, it’s not a law of the universe.
I assume @tcmx3’s point about happenstance is that some percentage of the population is much more able to invest the time and money (e.g. on education) to get a high paying job than the rest of the population. It takes resources to invest in yourself! People who aren’t able to do that do not work less hard — often they end up working harder just to make a reasonable living. That baker making croissants is probably working just as hard as the software engineer making 10x as much money. In particular, when we start saying “software engineering is harder than baking” be aware that what we actually mean is that it takes a greater up front investment to become a software engineer than a baker, not that the actual work is harder once you’ve acquired the necessary skillset. (You may argue that a smaller percentage of people have the “talent” to become software engineers vs bakers, or something, but even that I’d argue is more a result of opportunity and training.)
Anyway, I’m not an economist, so I have no idea how to solve these problems, but it’s clear to me from looking at other countries than the US that there are more equitable solutions available. There’s also this tendency to say “well, this is what the market wants” as if it excuses not caring about the people involved. If the market wants to pay some people 1000x more than other people, and decides that some people should work themselves to death just trying to make enough to live, maybe we shouldn’t operate within such a market? It’s a choice we’re all making to have the world work like this, it’s not a law of the universe.
M1k3
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user 16756
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There are lots of ways to account for it. You could, for example, overlay union membership on top of it. Or which sectors of the economy are stronger or weaker. Or the ability to perform regulatory capture... etc etc etc
The main point is that the actual base economic theory, that companies cannot seek rents from employee productivity because those employees would simply leave to go somewhere else where they would get their marginal output, is demonstrably false. Nearly all of what people not trained in economics believe has been at least partially destroyed by econometrics (i.e. economists insisting they have a different word for statistics than statistics).
A logical conclusion then, if we accept the straight up reality that people are not being paid solely or even primarily based on what they offer to a company's bottom line, is that our cultural "common knowledge" that these so called unskilled workers get paid so little because they are unproductive, or otherwise undeserving being tied to the job they do or how they do it, is a lie. But of course it is; it is just a different way to argue the same point that people with titles of nobility have made throughout history. Somehow, they "deserve" it, and the people under their thumb "deserve" that.
For the record I do not think that it's as simple as cutting everyone to having exactly the same salary and boom everything's grand all of a sudden. However, I am SUPREMELY unsympathetic to the idea that those of us making big salaries or going off family money ought to blame the lowest income workers for our toys being more expensive.
deskjockey
Senior Member
While the bulk of the current trend in this thread is targeted towards the USA and to a lesser extent the EU, it pales in comparison to the Mid-East, China, and Russia.
What I personally witnessed in the UAE makes the worst of the USA look good in comparison even if we are talking about the homeless drug addicts living on a sidewalk in California as just one example. Foreign born construction workers there lived not too farm removed from slavery IMHO which as hard as it is to believe was an improvement from where they came from. I witnessed entire families living in a 20' shipping container without electricity in the sweltering heat!
Uyghurs (Uighurs) are essentially living in WW2 NAZI styled concentration camps to make solar panel for the USA and EU. Then there are the children working forced labor to mine minerals to make those panels. Add the Zero COVID policy where residents were welded into their apartments so they could not get out to buy food for weeks. We will never know how many starved to death to prevent a small number of COVID deaths.
Russia is a whole separate level of human atrocity. Whether it is widespread alcoholism, forced and coerced military service to kill Ukrainian civilians or, the Oligarch's, that system makes ours look like a panacea in comparison even with our problems.
While things may not ALWAYS be fair and we have problems, ours really are first world problems in comparison. That doesn't mean we shouldn't fix them but, we should view them in comparison to the bigger picture.
What I personally witnessed in the UAE makes the worst of the USA look good in comparison even if we are talking about the homeless drug addicts living on a sidewalk in California as just one example. Foreign born construction workers there lived not too farm removed from slavery IMHO which as hard as it is to believe was an improvement from where they came from. I witnessed entire families living in a 20' shipping container without electricity in the sweltering heat!
Uyghurs (Uighurs) are essentially living in WW2 NAZI styled concentration camps to make solar panel for the USA and EU. Then there are the children working forced labor to mine minerals to make those panels. Add the Zero COVID policy where residents were welded into their apartments so they could not get out to buy food for weeks. We will never know how many starved to death to prevent a small number of COVID deaths.
Russia is a whole separate level of human atrocity. Whether it is widespread alcoholism, forced and coerced military service to kill Ukrainian civilians or, the Oligarch's, that system makes ours look like a panacea in comparison even with our problems.
While things may not ALWAYS be fair and we have problems, ours really are first world problems in comparison. That doesn't mean we shouldn't fix them but, we should view them in comparison to the bigger picture.
deskjockey
Senior Member
That I can agree with.
Along with even the lowest unskilled labor doing a job has some value, every workers work output has value whether we see it or not. Even jail work release programs that pick up trash on the side of the road has value even if people in general don't consider it as such.
Ian basically said what I wanted to say here. I think the danger of using "skill"-based arguments here if it implies those with no skill don't deserve a decent wage/lifestyle, which I disagree with.
Given all that, of course I'm willing to pay a bit more for my toys (knives, etc) and food so others don't have to suffer as much.
I think the initial reaction against the shops here does fall in that spirit: there was a concern that knife shops were profiteering without cutting in the maker. But it seems to not be the case according to more investigation (other than shops buying stuff from shows and flipping them. I don't understand these shows but it does sound like people say the intent is to sell them to people not shops)
