3 ms·

What do you think the average wage should be? I'm getting the impression that a lot of people think $100-200,000 a year should be the 'norm' for many jobs, but

by CM30 7y ago

What do you think the average wage should be? I'm getting the impression that a lot of people think $100-200,000 a year should be the 'norm' for many jobs, but I'm not entirely sure myself.

js2 7y ago
I think anyone who works a 9-5 job should be able to take care of a parter and raise a couple kids, not have to worry about healthcare or being able to afford basic housing and the necessities of a modern life, and be able to save for retirement. Using the Raleigh metro area, for example, that works out to about $90K/year, not including retirement: https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/ https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/ To the extent that isn't possible, I think something is wrong in the labor market.
- distances 7y ago
  > To the extent that isn't possible, I think something is wrong in the labor market. Or, perhaps even more common, something wrong with the housing market.
- CM30 7y ago
  > I think anyone who works a 9-5 job should be able to take care of a parter and raise a couple kids, not have to worry about healthcare or being able to afford basic housing and the necessities of a modern life, and be able to save for retirement. I'd definitely agree with this. And I'd also partly wonder whether this could be used to sell companies/the well off on better housing/land use/rent control policies too, since in many places, the only reason the expectations have gotten so high is because the system is simply broken/completely unaffordable. For someone to get the kind of lifestyle mentioned in central London or near Silicon Valley, you'd need at least a couple of hundred grand a year. Maybe this would change if people realised that the more they fight affordable housing, the more it'll hit them/their companies financially having to pay out for their workers to live in such broken systems.
geofft 7y ago
Part of the difficulty in that question is that if everyone makes $100K, the purchasing power of $100K will drift pretty rapidly. For what it's worth, I'm of the opinion that the long tail of high-paying jobs (which I count myself in, to be clear) is having a negative effect on the cost of living by making it easy for us to drive up the prices of limited resources like housing near an urban core, restaurant reservations near an urban core, etc. If you curtail that somehow (my preferred approach is heavy taxation, but you could also regulate salaries or perhaps encourage the free market to charge people disproportionately more if they make more money), I suspect the problem will fix itself, and <<$100K salaries will start to go farther. Then you don't need to solve the problem of where we get more funding for journalism / taxi driving / whatever from.
- js2 7y ago
  > Part of the difficulty in that question is that if everyone makes $100K, the purchasing power of $100K will drift pretty rapidly. The economy is more complicated than that. Debt allows people to continue to purchase beyond their means and obviously there's massive debt in the economy right now. With higher salaries, prices could stay the same but there could be less debt.
  - geofft 7y ago
    Sure, but the reality is I have greater access to debt (credit) with a greater salary. I can buy a house in the small town I grew up in, in cash, but instead I'm going to get a mortgage and buy a tiny place in this expensive big city (and participate in this big city's increasingly expensive housing market). I don't think it follows that if you pay everyone more, the appetite for debt goes away. I think you'll just get inflation, and the same amount of debt after adjusting for inflation.
- harimau777 7y ago
  On the other hand, one of the primary advantages that the US has over Europe in hiring software engineers is that they pay them dramatically more. If US companies started paying less I could see software engineers leaving for countries with higher standards of living.

by CM30 7y ago

What do you think the average wage should be? I'm getting the impression that a lot of people think $100-200,000 a year should be the 'norm' for many jobs, but I'm not entirely sure myself.

js2 7y ago

I think anyone who works a 9-5 job should be able to take care of a parter and raise a couple kids, not have to worry about healthcare or being able to afford basic housing and the necessities of a modern life, and be able to save for retirement. Using the Raleigh metro area, for example, that works out to about $90K/year, not including retirement: https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/ https://www.epi.org/resources/budget/ To the extent that isn't possible, I think something is wrong in the labor market.

distances 7y ago
> To the extent that isn't possible, I think something is wrong in the labor market. Or, perhaps even more common, something wrong with the housing market.
CM30 7y ago
> I think anyone who works a 9-5 job should be able to take care of a parter and raise a couple kids, not have to worry about healthcare or being able to afford basic housing and the necessities of a modern life, and be able to save for retirement. I'd definitely agree with this. And I'd also partly wonder whether this could be used to sell companies/the well off on better housing/land use/rent control policies too, since in many places, the only reason the expectations have gotten so high is because the system is simply broken/completely unaffordable. For someone to get the kind of lifestyle mentioned in central London or near Silicon Valley, you'd need at least a couple of hundred grand a year. Maybe this would change if people realised that the more they fight affordable housing, the more it'll hit them/their companies financially having to pay out for their workers to live in such broken systems.

geofft 7y ago

Part of the difficulty in that question is that if everyone makes $100K, the purchasing power of $100K will drift pretty rapidly. For what it's worth, I'm of the opinion that the long tail of high-paying jobs (which I count myself in, to be clear) is having a negative effect on the cost of living by making it easy for us to drive up the prices of limited resources like housing near an urban core, restaurant reservations near an urban core, etc. If you curtail that somehow (my preferred approach is heavy taxation, but you could also regulate salaries or perhaps encourage the free market to charge people disproportionately more if they make more money), I suspect the problem will fix itself, and <<$100K salaries will start to go farther. Then you don't need to solve the problem of where we get more funding for journalism / taxi driving / whatever from.

js2 7y ago
> Part of the difficulty in that question is that if everyone makes $100K, the purchasing power of $100K will drift pretty rapidly. The economy is more complicated than that. Debt allows people to continue to purchase beyond their means and obviously there's massive debt in the economy right now. With higher salaries, prices could stay the same but there could be less debt.
- geofft 7y ago
  Sure, but the reality is I have greater access to debt (credit) with a greater salary. I can buy a house in the small town I grew up in, in cash, but instead I'm going to get a mortgage and buy a tiny place in this expensive big city (and participate in this big city's increasingly expensive housing market). I don't think it follows that if you pay everyone more, the appetite for debt goes away. I think you'll just get inflation, and the same amount of debt after adjusting for inflation.
harimau777 7y ago
On the other hand, one of the primary advantages that the US has over Europe in hiring software engineers is that they pay them dramatically more. If US companies started paying less I could see software engineers leaving for countries with higher standards of living.