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Comment by alecbenzer | Hacker News Reader

> a postdoctoral scientist has tons of training, and that should come with a boost in salary

Labor theory of value? Just because you spent time acquiring skills doesn't mean that others value those skills enough to pay you for utilizing them.

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The listed postdoc salary is the same for fields where you have very applicable skills that industry is very willing to pay you 6 figures for.

Ok? What's ultimately valuable then is the things you can do with those skills, not the skills themselves. If you take the same skills and do things with them that others care less about, you'll be paid less.

Sure. That's exactly how it works, and I don't see any problem with that.

My point was that postdoc salaries don't vary much by field.

> If you take the same skills and do things with them that others care less about, you'll be paid less.

The point is that if even if you do exactly the same thing and are a post doctoral researcher in an industrial lab; you will earn more than what you would do with the same execution in academics.

If you're really doing the exact same thing, then why not just move to an industrial lab -- problem solved? Presumably there's a reason some people want to stay in academia, which seems to imply they're doing something different there?

Supply and demand. Funny how often people want to ignore it.

Came here to say this, glad someone said it first. The sense of entitlement that sometimes comes with higher academic degrees is flat-out weird. Congratulations you have a PhD, keep making meaningful contributions but don't expect to get well paid until you earn it by bringing an idea/product that has real/perceived value to market.

This is why government funding of science is so important. The government funds long term projects that couldn't possibly be 'brought to market' by a private company: weather data, gps, even that old chestnut, the internet, the postal service.

The timeframe is too long, so we collectively decide to pay for basic research with the understanding that some chunk of it might be useful at some time.

Basic science is not an activity that jives well with the profit motive (again, because of the long time frames), yet it is a required foundation for the 'value add' products that companies are good at bringing to market.

So, the question is, do we want to continue to invest in long term thinking via the government? Do we want to structure other institutions (foundations, corporations, non profits, universities) in such a way they have an incentive to undertake long term projects? Can we have individuals take part in this? Do we want to abandon big projects with uncertain return?

> weather data, gps, even that old chestnut, the internet, the postal service

I think it's a stretch to say that these things "couldn't possibly [have been] brought to market by a private company" -- especially not only because it was government that happened to fund those things (I mean, doesn't the existence UPS/FedEx pretty strongly imply that a private postal service is/would have been viable?)

> so we collectively decide to pay for basic research with the understanding that some chunk of it might be useful at some time

That's not quite what happens. _Some_ collectively decide that _all_ should pay for basic research.

People also forget about things like "the pony express" (a creative effort by a private delivery company to fill a niche market), Spooner's American Letter Mail Company and other wuch precedents. The post office would have been driven out of business by private companies long ago if it were legally permitted to undercut their rates.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Letter_Mail_Company

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