If only we had a system where (special) judges were able to determine who works hard and who doesn't and from there decide who gets what amount of pay, and who deserves a promotion. We could actually have a fair society.
Then there's the arbitrage possibilities; are the judges globally uniform? (How are you going to achieve that?)
Then there's the classic Keynsian "usefulness" problem; you can have a whole load of people working hard digging holes and another group of people filling them in, and that constitutes hard work?
All of us would of course be out of jobs and toiling in the fields, as there is nothing so dangerous in this environment as a process improvement. Making the work easier would reduce compensation, so there's a really strong incentive not to improve the process and to sabotage anyone who attempts to do so.
No, I think we have to have the humility to understand as humans that we can't know the answers to this with any kind of precision, and to be more humble in the judgements that we must make,
> If only we had a system where (special) judges were able to determine who works hard and who doesn't and from there decide who gets what amount of pay, and who deserves a promotion. We could actually have a fair society.
Why should pay be based on how hard one works? I know when I started my career I had to work _much_ harder, because I had not yet been around the block so to speak. As time went on I became much more efficient with my time, experience makes it easier to see patterns, etc.
So if the metric is how hard one works, as I get better at my job I'd actually get paid less?
We would be better off paying people more for easy work. People would target what they exceled at. Productivity increases. Our quality of life would increase but some jobs wouldn't get filled.