6 ms·

Which professions are paid too much given their value to society?

• sorokod 9y ago
  An easy example for the opposite question of "Which professions are paid too little given their value to society? ". Hospital nurses in UK, they perform life saving work and paid rubbish money.
  • nawitus 9y ago
    I don't understand what "value" means here. There is a large number of "jobs", maybe even majority of jobs, which without a modern society would not function. Would you then calculate the value of these jobs as the value of modern society divided by the number of employed people with the given job?
  • bryanlarsen 9y ago
    Before or after overtime? My understanding is that here in Canada most nurses doing shift work make 6 figures. Hospitals are understaffed so there's lots of overtime available, and of course nursing is a 24/7 job. The night shift premium and the overtime premium multiply so picking up a single extra night shift can gross $1000.
    • albertgoeswoof 9y ago
      Nurses in the U.K. don't get overtime. They can join bank nursing which is like a separate pool of nurses to cover these gaps. Pay is a bit higher but not by much. NHS pay rates are here: https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/about/careers-nhs/nhs-pay-and-benefits/agenda-change-pay-rates https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/about/careers-nhs/nhs-pay-a... Registered nurses are on band 5 and start at the bottom (22k GBP). They move up a point every year. No band 5 nurses in the UK make six figures.
      • albertgoeswoof 9y ago
        Also to add to this: - nurses pay around 500 gbp per year for their nursing pin (registration) and union membership, which is required for insurance purposes - nhs pensions take out a further 7%
    • k__ 9y ago
      My girlfriend is nurse in Germany and she makes under 2000€ a month. I think when she worked 100% it was 1700€ or something.
  • deleted 9y ago
    [deleted]
• hkmurakami 9y ago
  BadicLly any profession with high levels of credential based regulation and supply constraining that reduces competition. Dentistry is a great example that forbids even simple procedures to be done by non certified practitioners.
  • seanmcdirmid 9y ago
    Dentistry in other non-USA countries is much less regulated than medicine (which is pretty much socialized). So in Israel, if you want to make money, you become a dentist rather than a doctor.
• xwvvvvwx 9y ago
  Obviously bankers
• whitefish 9y ago
  Real estate agents (in the USA at least)
  • ahoka 9y ago
    Not just the USA, 99.99% of them are leeches. Head hunters are in the same category.
  • sharkweek 9y ago
    Two anecdotes: Buying a house is the biggest list of "fees" I've ever seen in my life. I felt so nickel-and-dimed with random $50-500 fees tacked onto every part of the transaction. My mom just sold a condo as well, same thing with tons of superfluous random fees throughout the process on that side of the transaction. A friend of mine, who is a really nice guy, so I don't hold this against him at all, but was kind of flopping in his career until his early 30s. Started as a real estate agent out of the blue in the Seattle market a few years back. Is now making 2-3x more than most of us. I'm happy to see him successful, but I also take this as an example of the job having pretty low barrier to entry to make a lot of money.
  • treehau5 9y ago
    As someone who just recently sold FSBO, this rings true to me. Real Estate agents provide an entirely 100% superfluous service especially in relation to the absurd amount of commission they charge. The important aspects of selling a home are done by inspectors, appraisers, and lawyers. The Real Estate agents are basically leeching middlemen that keep as many people out as possible to keep their perceived monopoly, which sadly most of us are forced to use out of our own will because despite it being explicitly laid out as unethical in their guidelines, real estate agents will only work with other agents and skip over homes that are FSBO. The only other equivalent I have found is financial advisors. * a little caveat: I am little bit bitter about the process and the "locking out" I faced. One real estate agent even told me this up front, which I was like "Dude you know I could report you for saying this and you could lose your license right?" But alas I just shook my head and carried on.
    • jstanley 9y ago
• lawn 9y ago
  Lobbyists.
• blakesterz 9y ago
  The title of that post is "Which jobs do economists say create the largest spillover benefits for society?" and is about a paper "Taxation and the Allocation of Talent" https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1324424 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1324424
• deleted 9y ago
  [deleted]
• pavlakoos 9y ago
  Polititians
• joezydeco 9y ago
  High speed trading quants?
• marvel_boy 9y ago
  Head hunters.
• matthewmcg 9y ago
  Based on the table with the article, asset managers seem to have the largest negative externality.
• 628C6l0 9y ago
  business professors. economists.
• ableton 9y ago
  The main reason for this is government regulation artificially limiting supply. For example, being a lawyer isn't that hard. You could intern with a lawyer and read books on law yourself and get just as good an education. That's what our founding fathers did. However the lawyers want as few people as possible to enter their profession so they make incredibly stupid requirements for becoming a lawyer, such as having to have an undergrad degree.(which can be for literally anything) Policies like this are horrible because they drive up the cost of both lawyers and school. It also lowers the quality of education because educators are now in a position of unfair power over prospective lawyers since they can say who can and can't practice law.
• wyldfire 9y ago
  This thread seems to have few comments on the article and several on the title. It's not an HN survey, it's an article regarding a research paper [1]. IMO -- this kind of data could/should benefit teachers and researchers who want to argue that their benefit to society isn't reflected in the existing high school/undergrad/graduate metrics. Instead of paying teachers/researchers the wage that reflects an equilibrium between available supply and job demand, maybe we could offer something that offsets their (positive) externality. I suppose it only makes sense for public schools since private entities aren't focused on things like this. But there's a lot of debate over public school funding and this seems like a great input to that debate. [1] http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1324424 http://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.1324424
  • ignostic 9y ago
    But I so badly wanted to share my opinion on /r/askhn rehashing commonly-held beliefs..
  • raleighm 9y ago
    Perhaps, but teachers not capturing enough of the economic value of their teaching shouldn't be the core of an argument to pay teachers more. This is an impoverished view of the value of education (from the paper you linked): "We calculate the social product of teaching as the impact of an additional year of schooling on aggregate earnings of all workers in the economy. The spillover from teaching is then this social product less the annual earnings of all teachers."
• thedevil 9y ago
  Note that GDP is only a proxy for value to society. It's based on what's measurable, not on what's valuable. Prisons and wars increase GDP but make us worse off. Likewise, many free apps (e.g. Google Maps) significantly improve our lives but don't significantly impact GDP. This matters because the approach used to measure externalities may undervalue software engineers and teachers and overvalue defense contractors and lobbyists. Edit: This is really important for software. Software has low marginal cost so the market price (and therefore measured GDP) trends towards 0 but the (mostly unmeasured) consumer surplus is huge. Another Edit: Note that externalities for defense contractors and lobbyists actually weren't measured here and probably couldn't be reliably measured with this technique due to international differences, but they made great examples for my explanation.
• Silhouette 9y ago
  Managers, as a group. A good manager on the right project can make a huge contribution to that project's success. Ditto a good senior leader running a large organisation. I have no problem with these people being compensated accordingly. However, many people in management positions aren't particularly good at it, yet still command compensation as if they were. In far too many cases, a manager is even making their organisation less effective overall than if they just left and let the people doing the work figure something out between them, yet still commanding that high compensation.
• michaelt 9y ago
  It would be interesting to see these results cross-checked, by applying the methods from one job to another - for example by applying the methods used for law and engineering (Cross-country regression of GDP on <job> per capita) to the other fields listed. Personally I find the results presented surprising - especially the claim of research being worth 25% of GDP, which seems very high to me.
  • thrden 9y ago
    I agree, they said that they were basing the externality on how much people would theoretically pay for longevity. That number is very likely to be inflated, as people are likely "willing to pay" more than they may be actually able to pay. Further not all research is medical longevity enhancement research. Overall it seems very sloppy.
• istorical 9y ago
  Something I've always questioned is why certain jobs in the United States are expected to be tipped but others aren't: Why does a bartender at a bar that isn't very busy who simply pours me a draft beer out of a tap deserve a dollar when a guy making burritos at Chipotle during the lunch rush who can't take a break for 3 hours straight doesn't get any tips? I've had bartenders hand me a can of beer for 2 dollars, I come back 20 minutes later and ask for another and they say "ok but I'm going to charge you extra because you didn't tip". If I ever did that when I worked at any fast food job I've ever had I would have been fired. Either have a tipping culture or don't, but don't have social punishments for skipping tipping on bartenders or restaurant waiters but then don't tip me EVER when I work a different minimum wage job that can be just as hectic. Many bartenders and waiters take the approach of tipping constantly at other low paying service jobs, which is very admirable. But others will berate you if you mention that you don't tip for every drink at a bar while they themselves see no hypocrisy or problem that they aren't tipping low paid workers in other industries. Before someone mentions that some of those tipping jobs can have pay that's less than minimum wage - remember that if tips don't make up the difference then the employer is legally required to pay the minimum wage for that shift.
  • Overtonwindow 9y ago
    This is why I take a flask to the bar. Cheaper.
  • valbaca 9y ago
    > employer is legally required to pay the minimum wage for that shift. Right because if you're getting paid $2/hr + tips and make less than min wage because you didn't get tipped, you sure have the means to file a lawsuit. If you can't afford to tip, you can't afford to eat out.
    • loco5niner 9y ago
      > If you can't afford to tip, you can't afford to eat out. Sure, if you only go to places where it is proper to tip, but there are plenty of places to eat out where NOT tipping is appropriate. I believe that tipping should be based on the level of service provided, not on the financial status/need of either the provider or the consumer. If I'm getting takeout, I rarely tip more than a dollar. If it's a place where I bus my own table and pickup my food at the counter, I don't tip at all. On numerous occasions where I felt I got wonderful service, I've tipped $20 on a 10 dollar meal. Generally, I'll tip 15% - 20% based on service level.
• Overtonwindow 9y ago
  I think we can find groups of people in every profession that are paid too much given their value to society. I wouldn't say one profession over the other is overpaid. Someone is paying for that profession. I think there's a lot of tenured college professors who are grossly overpaid for the little value they bring to teaching, but as a whole, professors do bring value to society. It's a tough question to answer.
• mdekkers 9y ago
  politicians