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Comment by tejohnso | Hacker News Reader

I think another option when naming your amount is to name an amount that would make you happy, not just one that you are willing to work for.

So let's say you name an amount that would make you happy, and you get it. Someone else names their (higher) amount, and they get it.

You're both happy!

Two months later you find out their amount.

Why does their happiness amount affect your happiness? Would you be happier if they were paid less? Maybe they should be paid the amount that would make you happy instead of what would make them happy? Why? Their circumstances are different, they are different people, whose requirement for happiness is different than yours.

Surely you'd be happy making more, as much as they do, but we already established that you were already happy two months ago.

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> name an amount that would make you happy

This doesn't really exist. What people want is the most they can get, and this will make them as happy as is possible in the market. They would be as happy as anyone could possibly be about wages if they were offered an infinite wage.

"The amount that would make you happy" is a pragmatic minimum amount that would tempt you away from your current employment (or from further looking for other employment.) It's a buyer's price, not a seller's price.

> Why does their happiness amount affect your happiness? Would you be happier if they were paid less? Maybe they should be paid the amount that would make you happy instead of what would make them happy? Why? Their circumstances are different, they are different people, whose requirement for happiness is different than yours.

This is the problem with reifying the concept of an "amount that would make you happy." You've fallen into abstraction and spiritual condemnation. It's not illogical or irrational to not be happy with being paid less than you could be paid doing the same job, and it's insulting to treat employees like fools with this backwards logic.

If the employer is happy paying that other employee twice as much as you, why wouldn't they be happy paying you just as much? If they're happy with the deal with the other employee enough to continue it, why wouldn't they be happy with giving you that same deal? Really silly reasoning.

> This doesn't really exist. What people want is the most they can get, and this will make them as happy as is possible in the market.

Well I think it does exist. You can be happy with what you have regardless of what others have, can you not? Otherwise you're doomed to unhappiness, unfortunately.

> It's not illogical or irrational to not be happy with being paid less than you could be paid doing the same job

Agreed, it's not illogical or irrational, but it is sub-optimal if one is concerned with being happy with what they have rather than comparing against external entities and adjusting happiness downward unnecessarily.

> treat employees like fools

I don't think it's backward or disrespectful to ask someone what would make them happy and then give it to them.

I think it would be illogical to say "I want to make more than, or just as much as, anybody else doing what I do". Actually, I think maybe it's emotionally childish, rather than illogical. Not that I've never though that way myself. It's just that from a personal growth perspective, I don't think it's a mentality that leads to happiness in the long run.

Sure, I’m unhappy in this scenario, because my previous happiness was due to an information asymmetry. I don’t know how high HR is willing to go; apparently they were willing to go higher, and if I had that information I would have specified a bigger number because, while there is certainly a lower bound on numbers that make me happy, there is no upper bound.

> there is no upper bound

This is essentially saying that you're not happy unless you're being paid the maximum the company is willing to pay, now and in the future rather than choosing to be happy with an amount that fits your own needs. This means your happiness changes based on the circumstances of an external entity, rather than changing based on your own circumstances, which seems strange.

I am happy if I am paid what my labor is worth. I accept being paid slightly less, because the entity purchasing my labor needs to make a profit.

I am not happy if I am paid significantly less — essentially this means that my employer has found a way to arbitrage my labor, and instead of sharing this information (and the value I create) they've decided to simply pocket the difference.

Yes, this is more in line with what I meant in my original comment. Thanks!

But you could continue to be happy: you're being paid what you were happy being pad, and now you have information that you are worth even more, which you can now leverage.

Most people have an innate sense of fairness. If two people are doing the same thing, and one is getting compensated more for it, unless that person is deliberately kept ignorant of this fact, they are likely to feel that it is unfair.

Even if they were happy with the amount they were making before, that unfairness is likely to make them feel unhappy: not just because they could be making more, but because this says "we value this other person more than we value you, for reasons we're unlikely to ever tell you."

If, instead, this whole scenario started out with full pay transparency, it is vastly less likely that the company would be willing to allow this level of disparity in the first place, thus avoiding any party feeling unhappy.

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