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This is incredibly circular. "The reason these people are highly paid is because they deliver value." "But what is value?" "Why it's what people get paid of co

This is incredibly circular. "The reason these people are highly paid is because they deliver value." "But what is value?" "Why it's what people get paid of course!" In reality, pay isn't at all a proxy for anything humans actually value. If it was, nurses and teachers would be extremely highly paid, while advertising executives and sharepoint consultants would be paid less than zero.

derefr 7y ago
> pay isn't at all a proxy for anything humans actually value Sure it is: pay is a proxy for how valuable a tool you are in your own boss's game of office politics. Executives and consultants are both incredibly powerful fiefdom-building tools within a company. Nurses and teachers, given their principles (and the horizontally-bureaucratic "slave of many masters" nature of medicine and education), are nearly the opposite.
shoo 7y ago
i agree that it is necessary to clearly separate "value delivered" from "value extracted". but i think you also need to talk about "value for who?" Who gains?. Who loses? e.g. advertising executives can deliver a large amount of value to the owners of companies by helping those companies generate demand and increase sales. But perhaps at the same time they create or destroy value for the people on the receiving end of the advertising (in the best case, discovering a product or service that genuinely helps them, in the worst case, tricking them into consuming a product or service that is harmful). There is probably also value destruction, spread in small amounts over large populations and large timescales, in terms of the opportunity cost of committing resources to producing whatever product or service was sold, instead of doing something else with those resources that would benefit a larger group of people, or a future group of people who don't exist yet. e.g. "i helped my mate Frank deliver a large amount of value by driving the getaway car after Frank robbed the bank". Frank has a business that generates value for himself. I helped Frank deliver that value from the bank to himself. Frank gives me a cut of the value. It is possible that we also may generate value for various other stakeholders by improving the velocity of currency throughout the local economy.
tryptophan 7y ago
>nurses and teachers would be extremely highly paid Nurses do quite well in the US. Its actually one of the best (education / ($ * time)) investments you can make. In the UK, they do terribly. In the usa teachers don't do so well either. Some would argue that the government involvement prevents their true value from being discovered. (Could you imagine trying to get your CS skills valued by society? I see tons of complaints about _management_ not valuing their workers properly(despite the comparatively high salaries for CS jobs). Do you think the government's/voters' assessment would be higher or lower?). >advertising executives and sharepoint consultants would be paid less than zero. Well, unless the people who hire them are total idiots in reality, perhaps the world is a bit more complicated than that and you may be missing part of the picture? Some things may be dumb/inelegant, and the engineer mindset takes over and make you angry at _such imperfection_ and how you could do it better! But at the end of the way it works well enough.
eloff 7y ago
Pay is a rough proxy for how much your employer values your product. Presumably your employer makes a profit out of your work, or they would fire you. This is the efficient market hypothesis applied to the labor market.
atemerev 7y ago
Pay is how other people value your work, by definition. Perhaps some people are not acting rationally in that regard... but nevertheless.

derefr 7y ago

> pay isn't at all a proxy for anything humans actually value Sure it is: pay is a proxy for how valuable a tool you are in your own boss's game of office politics. Executives and consultants are both incredibly powerful fiefdom-building tools within a company. Nurses and teachers, given their principles (and the horizontally-bureaucratic "slave of many masters" nature of medicine and education), are nearly the opposite.

shoo 7y ago

i agree that it is necessary to clearly separate "value delivered" from "value extracted". but i think you also need to talk about "value for who?" Who gains?. Who loses? e.g. advertising executives can deliver a large amount of value to the owners of companies by helping those companies generate demand and increase sales. But perhaps at the same time they create or destroy value for the people on the receiving end of the advertising (in the best case, discovering a product or service that genuinely helps them, in the worst case, tricking them into consuming a product or service that is harmful). There is probably also value destruction, spread in small amounts over large populations and large timescales, in terms of the opportunity cost of committing resources to producing whatever product or service was sold, instead of doing something else with those resources that would benefit a larger group of people, or a future group of people who don't exist yet. e.g. "i helped my mate Frank deliver a large amount of value by driving the getaway car after Frank robbed the bank". Frank has a business that generates value for himself. I helped Frank deliver that value from the bank to himself. Frank gives me a cut of the value. It is possible that we also may generate value for various other stakeholders by improving the velocity of currency throughout the local economy.

tryptophan 7y ago

>nurses and teachers would be extremely highly paid Nurses do quite well in the US. Its actually one of the best (education / ($ * time)) investments you can make. In the UK, they do terribly. In the usa teachers don't do so well either. Some would argue that the government involvement prevents their true value from being discovered. (Could you imagine trying to get your CS skills valued by society? I see tons of complaints about _management_ not valuing their workers properly(despite the comparatively high salaries for CS jobs). Do you think the government's/voters' assessment would be higher or lower?). >advertising executives and sharepoint consultants would be paid less than zero. Well, unless the people who hire them are total idiots in reality, perhaps the world is a bit more complicated than that and you may be missing part of the picture? Some things may be dumb/inelegant, and the engineer mindset takes over and make you angry at _such imperfection_ and how you could do it better! But at the end of the way it works well enough.

eloff 7y ago

Pay is a rough proxy for how much your employer values your product. Presumably your employer makes a profit out of your work, or they would fire you. This is the efficient market hypothesis applied to the labor market.

atemerev 7y ago

Pay is how other people value your work, by definition. Perhaps some people are not acting rationally in that regard... but nevertheless.