2 ms·

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 t

by 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 geofft 7y ago

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.