People aren't rational. "Works a high paying job" feels different from "makes $120000 when even the most highly paid people in my long forgotten rural town make

People aren't rational. "Works a high paying job" feels different from "makes $120000 when even the most highly paid people in my long forgotten rural town make only $35000", and so the response will be different. That said, I don't think it should be necessary to defend privacy. The idea proposed up-thread is to publish all income data on everybody. Not merely to encourage people to share their income data so they can reduce the information differential with employers, or some central opt-in system to make it easier to compare the numbers. It's about fully _enforced_ transparency. A proposal for such forced loss of agency needs explanation and must be defensible against scrutiny, not the request to leave people alone just like they're used to.