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Comment by hugh3 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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> 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.

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?

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.

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