just some real thoughts wrote:
appleswan wrote:
Agreed but they really need to stop the rhetoric about free market economics rewarding the most productive, useful people. Maybe I should have called it insincerity. They will happily go to Moscow or Mumbai and pay less. Any ambition you have for a good life with a high salary will negatively impact your ability to be hired.
The market does reward the most productive, useful people. Employers seek to pay as little as possible while employees seek to earn as much as possible, and they meet in a mutually agreed middle. Try to at least understand the 101 before giving us your socialist schtick.
It's not a socialist stick - it's an acknowledgment that the conventional wisdom you site is not factual or immutable. It is just a nice story that is easy to digest.
The mutually agreed upon middle would be possible if both sides had equal power, but this is not the case. You may be the world's greatest programmer but it is doubtful your skills are so superior to other programmers than a company would be willing to bend over backwards to accommodate your wages, or that your skills would even be applicable to rote, corporate processes.
Alternatively circumstances outside of one's control may force them to accept wages they usually would not (need for healthcare, threat of offshoring, etc.).
For employers and employees to meet in the middle labor would need more power.
Getting outside of econ 101, salaries are total capricious and not based on any metric like 'hard-work' or 'value'. I make around $150k a year working in Strategy Operations. I work about 4 hours a week, browse Letsrun during all of my meetings, and spend the majority of my time reading. I am a functionally useless worker but I command a sizeable wage. Compare that to someone essential like a garbageman, or a farm day laborer, and your theory about rewarding the most productive and useful people fails to hold up.
Wages are more indicative of one's class position than intelligence or hard work.
FWIW I am not saying work is pointless or that anyone's hard work did not count for anything. But the dynamic of wages, value, and class are for deeper than we give them credit for.