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There needs to be a better-than-black-and-white way to use salary as a measuring stick. Perhaps salary above the local mean, or normalized by cost-of-living in
by eitally 11y ago
There needs to be a better-than-black-and-white way to use salary as a measuring stick. Perhaps salary above the local mean, or normalized by cost-of-living indicators, or something. As it is, if you earn $100k/yr in pretty much 90% of the country, you're doing fantastically and probably one of the wealthier people in town, but if you live in the top major metros (LA, NYC, Boston, SF/SV, DC, Seattle, Chicago, ...) you're probably wishing you had a partner who earned a similar salary so you could even consider buying a house some day. Just living within 5 miles of a Whole Foods doesn't mean someone is necessarily happier or better off.
- bkjelden 11y agoI agree, but I don't think you can get too specific with any metric without imposing your own value system on everyone. For example, some believe SF/SV is overpriced, some view the cost of living as a luxury expense and think it's easily justified by the weather/culture/etc.
- rattray 11y agoAgreed - it's an unfortunate that such an objective measure doesn't exist. I like to think of the problem as SF (for example) not having its own currency when it does have its own economy. SF dollars are worth less than Kansas dollars, for example. If we had a way of breaking this down, it might be easier to see which parts of pricing differential are "luxury expense."
- superuser2 11y agoPeople flock to highly selective colleges from all over, and go all over when they're done. You can't normalize cost of living to the location of the school, you'd have to look at each graduate's salary compared to average in their field where they ended up. I would love to see that data, but it would be a lot of effort to gather.