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Comment by MrWestley | Hacker News Reader

So with all of this top x% talk that is going on I decided to see where I was on the scale. It was pretty pathetic. Not because I was low on the scale but rather very high. I don't consider myself to be very wealthy at all. Don't get me wrong I am doing well for myself. I worked hard to get what I have and I am good at what I do, but I should not be in the top 3%. I am not trying to brag, I think it is stupid and wrong that I am that high up on the scale. I'm not saying I earn too much (I am actually underpaid according the the industry i am in.) It is just that I can't believe that others are being paid that much less.

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The incredible wealth disparity in this country is quite disturbing. And one look at the data confirms that reality. Half of workers barely make enough to get by. And I assure you that a very large portion of those making under the median probably get poor benefits/heathcare (if they get them at all)

A lot employees in retail for example had their hours cut just enough to they become legally 'part-time' employees. This lets business off the hook from providing benefits like health care and other things. So these people go and get a second or even third job, all part time. They might work 60 hours / week but they are all close to minimum wage and at the first visit to the hospital they basically end up in bankruptcy.

Once you are in bankruptcy it can become more difficult to get jobs because shady employers often check credit history during the application process. Why? For the fuck of it, as part of the background check. So then there is this black mark on it.

There is not even a single thing that is wrong and we just fix that and bam! we are back up. Minimum wage is low, no single payer health system, our graduates are not competitive enough, housing is still expensive in major cities, there is just a lot of people just barely keeping their heads above the water. Not sure what the fix is and not saying there is a direct casual relationship between any of the things above or others, but it is obvious that he situation quite bad.

The real problem is that there's a huge disparity in talent. The worst of us are worth a whole lot less than the best of us. The question is: what do we do about that?

None of my talents matter if the office building I work in wasn't maintained.

None of my talents matter if the electricity that powers the servers I need wasn't generated and the systems of delivery weren't maintained.

None of my talents matter if the roads and public transport I rely upon to get to work weren't maintained.

None of my talents matter if the hardware I work with wasn't assembled and quality checked.

Etc, etc.

Sure.

But if someone is earning $26K a year, then this means that their labour isn't worth any more than twenty-six thousand dollars to anyone else. Money is, after all, a medium of exchange, and if your labour is only worth $26K this means you're contributing very little of any value to society... barely enough value to account for the baseline amount of wealth (food etc) which every one of us destroys each year just in order to stay alive.

People who only make $26K a year need to take a good hard look at themselves and say "How can I make the value of my labour higher, so that I'm contributing more than a minimal amount to society?" If they'd start thinking about the problem in the right way, they might be able to solve it.

> If someone is earning $26K a year, then this means that their labour isn't worth any more than twenty-six thousand dollars to anyone else.

This is trivially true.

>if your labour is only worth $26K this means you're contributing very little of any value to society

This is way, way wrong. This is a very pervasive error in reasoning. Just because someone is only willing to pay X amount for your labor, doesn't mean that labor is worth X amount to society. When there are a lot of people willing to perform said labor, that pushes down the monetary value of that labor. This is completely independent of its value to society.

If I knew some magic incantation that would cure cancer, this action would be invaluable to society. But if I taught 1 million people how to perform it, the cure for cancer's value to society does not decrease.

The problem is that people conflate value in the moral sense with monetary worth. Thus when someone's labor can only bring in 26K a year in the marketplace, somehow its seen as a moral failing on their part. It serves to transfer the burden of finding a place in society completely on the individual, instead of where it belongs; on society as a whole.

By the time a million people have learned the incantation, the value of teaching it to one more person is much lower, because it was already pretty easy to find one. No matter how important the labor is, at some point we have enough people doing it, and the pay is supposed to be a signal that attracts people to other needs which aren't being met.

No argument from me there. But this is where I think the burden is also on society, not solely on the individual to reinvent themselves to find a niche. The purpose of society is to manage scarce resources. No one has a "right" to more resources than the next guy, simply because he has a particular skill. It is society that sets up the environment for these vasts imbalances of distribution, where an 'arbitrary' skill can reward you with vast amounts of wealth. Thus it is the burden of society to create mechanisms to balance this distribution.

Capitalism is preferable because it can manage resources better than any central planning can (at least pre-strong AI), but since imbalance is inherent in capitalism its also imperative to provide opportunities to mitigate imbalances within the system, in the form of education, skill training, etc.

>>if your labour is only worth $26K this means you're >>contributing very little of any value to society

>This is way, way wrong. This is a very pervasive error in >reasoning. Just because someone is only willing to pay X >amount for your labor, doesn't mean that labor is worth X >amount to society. When there are a lot of people willing >to perform said labor, that pushes down the monetary value >of that labor. This is completely independent of its value >to society

bzzt, wrong - if you're paid less it means your skill is of less value to society - supply is just a part of the equation. No one wants a cat chef - the skill is worthless to society - even if you are the only one that can fillet a cat.

Your last paragraph is dead-on, though. Societal worth does not equate to moral worth - on a moral scale, all men are equal. On a societal scale, not so much.

>if you're paid less it means your skill is of less value to society

Nope. The point is that someone is willing to pay for a skill does not equal what that skill is worth to society. I think my example explains the distinction well, you've said nothing to refute it. People love to refer to market value as if it correlates with actual worth. This is just wrong. There are plenty of instances of things that have much value but the market cannot price them properly.

I disagree that someone making $26000/year is not contributing to society for many reasons. First, Job != Purpose. There are plenty of people who do a lot for very little money. Maybe they contribute outside of work. Second, how much you make != your contribution to society. There are people making millions that are detrimental to society. Lastly, wages are based on supply and demand. You if you the same thing that millions of other people do you will get paid less. It doesn't matter how important it is.

You are assuming a Perfectly Competitive market for labor, free of structural disparities or external demand/supply shocks. You're also assuming that all employers take Normal Profits without collecting economic rents.

Seriously? Income = social contribution?

By your logic, all volunteer work is worthless. Likewise, a mother raising their child to become a good citizen has no value if they are not paid for it.

To put this into better perspective, consider the hypothetical that parents didn't toilet train their children. What would the cost to business be if they couldn't externalize this training to society?

Building managers typically get free or cheap housing and make pretty good income, one way or another. Architects, plumbers, contractors, and others involved in building and maintaining offices don't do bad, either. These jobs are in high demand; watch Dirty Jobs host Mike Rowe's TED talk: http://www.ted.com/talks/mike_rowe_celebrates_dirty_jobs.htm...

Electricians and others who run wiring for new installations (I know several people who do this) all make pretty good money. The guys who work for utility companies fixing stuff after storms are unionized and make a comfortable living. Power companies themselves make money not only in the delivery of services but also in state-of-the-art energy trading.

I have direct experience supervising road crews. Most states have a mandated minimum pay for road workers; even the guys holding the stop signs are making $16-22 an hour, and that was in Ohio, where the cost of living is about half of the Bay area. Public transit workers are also almost always unionized. Government workers (I interned at the County Engineer office) make salaries on-par with other knowledge workers and have generous retirement.

The hardware is the major outlier here, but for the most part, the workers making your hardware are doing relatively well for themselves compared to their fellow citizens. And they are largely irrelevant when discussing income inequality in the US.

The reality is that useful skills bring in good money. The people providing for your quality of life are doing pretty well for themselves and will always be in work. Being unskilled and being unable to provide real value is a problem without an easy solution. I feel that people should be ensured a base quality of life, but that's not free. If people didn't aspire to more, no one would have anything at all.

A lot of what people consider "talent" is arguably due to the right upbringing and social connections.

And would it be less unfair if instead of uprbringing and connections, it were due to genetics?

I don't understand what your point is. People are products of how they were raised and who they know as a result.

man, that's about the most arrogant way you could put it. I mean, at it's root, I think there is a valid question, "what do we do with unskilled laborers?"

The thing is, how much money you make? usually has more to do with how much money you are involved with than anything else. Now, sure, if you are highly skilled, you have a better chance of scoring the jobs involving more money, but that doesn't weigh any heavier than connections, certainly after you pass the bar of basic competence, from what I've seen. People working for top-end consulting companies, from what I've seen, are not on average much more skilled than people working at ISPs or smaller companies.

There is a 'shadow IT' industry where people do, essentially, our jobs for $10-$15/hr. Some of these people are quite good, (and often 'real IT' companies that pay real wages will snatch people out of this 'shadow IT' industry.) It's interesting to watch this happen; usually one person in the "shadow IT" industry will get a real job, and then the good people that one person knows? over the next few years they will get real jobs through this one person who got a job. I mean, you need a certain minimum level of skill to be considered, and beyond that, the better you are the more social bullshit people will overlook, but a lot of it really is 'who you know, not what you know.'

I know a bit about this, because I worked my way up through the 'shadow IT' industry into 'real IT' and now I run a company that is somewhere in between 'shadow IT' and 'real IT'

From what I've seen, the difference between working for peanuts in the 'shadow IT' industry and working for six figures in the 'real IT' industry, once you pass a certain minimum skill level, has more to do with who you know, and how confidently you can present at interviews than anything else. I can't tell you about several times where I was picked over people that I knew were vastly technically better than I was.

As for the real question you are asking, "what do we do with unskilled laborers?" well, there are two problems. first, there just isn't enough work to go around at minimum wage right now. Next, we live in a country where basic medical care is unaffordable on minimum wage.

I think both problems would be solved if we could find something higher-value for low-skilled people to do. I mean, sure, education maybe could help? but personally, I doubt it. I didn't go to school, and economically speaking, I am doing much better than people I know who did. I think most of the wage/education correlation you see has to do with the correlation between going to college and having well-off parents.

I mean, I've gotten a job through parental contacts (I mean, only one, but it was in the depth of the dot-com bust. I /really/ needed that job.) and almost all my other jobs through contacts that I earned myself; and yeah, I didn't go to college, but I had access to a computer, compilers, programming books, and training from a real live programmer and a real live sysadmin from the age of four on. I was privileged in the same way that most people who go to college are privileged.

He's not talking about people doing programming work for low pay. He's talking about talentless people--of which there are many. I mean--people who would starve to death or become criminals if it wasn't for the social safety net.

And the solution is genetic engineering, an infant technology.

Luckily, the recession is causing the wealth disparity to decrease.

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2011/10/the-1-ai...

Yes, but this isn't a good thing. The solution isn't to make the rich poor. It is to make sure everyone else can make more.

Nobody's suggesting making the rich poor. Increasing taxes by 10 or 20% on someone making over 250K a year will cost them another $800 or so a month in taxes.

To say that's making the rich "poor" is, frankly, offensive to people who actually are poor.

It's great to say we should enact policy that makes everyone richer. But it's basically saying something everyone can be in favor of because it has no concrete meaning.

Taxing the rich more so that everyone else can get better education and healthcare will make "everyone richer" in that it should raise per-capita GDP, but I don't think that's what you mean.

It's hard to understand how you could be surprised that 97% of Americans make less than $140,000.

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