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Lawyers are a counterexample. There are more law graduates than jobs. But starting salaries haven't gone down. David Graeber made this observation, and suggest

Lawyers are a counterexample. There are more law graduates than jobs. But starting salaries haven't gone down. David Graeber made this observation, and suggested some sort of class tribalism. Btw, to use cleaning as a specific example, taxation of domestic services is broken in almost every (western?) country and skews how people spend their time and money. Most professionals would happily trade an hour of work for an hour of cleaning services, however, by the time you put income tax (and VAT in my case) on top, your hours need to be about 2.5x times as valuable as your counterparty.

ForHackernews 6y ago
Salaries in law are famously bimodal: https://www.biglawinvestor.com/bimodal-salary-distribution-curve/ https://www.biglawinvestor.com/bimodal-salary-distribution-c... Law is a very status-conscious industry (even more than software) and so most of that oversupply of law graduates are not "in the club". They get paid relatively low wages and have to fight with each other for peanuts. Some much smaller fraction of law graduates from top schools or who otherwise have the right connections get paid extremely high salaries because they are only competing with each other.
- YinglingLight 6y ago
  Journalism weeds itself of those not "in the club" via unpaid or barely paid internships in the highest COL cities.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    Journalism is quite different in that most journalists don't make all that much. Also credentialing isn't nearly as big a factor. In fact, a lot of people in the industry look down on J-schools. The common career path among the non-freelance journalists I know at more prestigious publications is knocking around trade pubs and (at least formerly) small city papers before getting their break. (But, yes, connections matter too.)
  - ForHackernews 6y ago
    What's the relevance of journalism? It's not a lucrative industry and neither are individual journalists well-paid.
  - kevinmchugh 6y ago
    This is pretty recent, I think. There used to be a lot more newspapers with dedicated newsrooms in smaller cities. Carl Bernstein's first job was in Elizabeth, NJ. CJ Chivers started in Providence, RI. Dean Baquet started in NOLA.
    - selimthegrim 6y ago
      That's because Dean Baquet is from NOLA - his family owned Lil' Dizzy's restaurant for years
- ghaff 6y ago
  There is some middle ground of corporate lawyers and partners at smaller but relatively prosperous practices. But, yes, for the many it's making partner at a white shoe firm which tends to require attending one of a fairly small number of law schools and getting a prestigious clerkship--or you're running ads in the subway. You do get supply demand corrections over time though. If you know you'll be making minimum wage if you didn't go to a top law school a lot of people would stop doing so.
- neura 6y ago
  There are very few to no situations where your company or reputation or even your way of life depends on your cleaning service. Or another way to look at this is that lawyers get paid based on their reputation. Firms with a high reputation only have the ability to hire so many new lawyers. Those positions are indeed highly sought after, because that's how you get paid well, by getting in with a firm that already has a reputation. You're going to have a hard time starting out on your own, building up a reputation. Hell, sometimes you need to have built enough of a reputation just to get a position with a firm that has a high reputation. While people/companies are looking for the best person/firm they can afford to represent them... cleaners are still just cleaners.
eecc 6y ago
My take is that our (economically) liberal social order refuses to accept interdependence, especially towards the services that guarantee our otherness from our wild state (basically all essential ones such as nurses, garbage, etc) It’s basically a psychological refusal of our vulnerability in the world
dgfitz 6y ago
I believe lawyer salaries (at least in the US) have a bi-modal distribution. [1] Edit: What I mean to say is, the good lawyers make the same good money, the vast majority of lawyers do not. [1] https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib
- aphextron 6y ago
  >Edit: What I mean to say is, the good lawyers make the same good money, the vast majority of lawyers do not. It's also not even about being a "good" lawyer. It is completely determined by your law school and GPA. The big firms won't even look at your resume if you're not from a top 10 school.
  - dmoy 6y ago
    T13, and with some exceptions (some law firms will draw a top few students from more local law schools, for example, also certain specialties get different treatment). But generally yes. School first, then class rank.
  - PaulHoule 6y ago
    The lawyer who helped my mom write her will was a co-worker at a department store before he went to night school and got a law degree. He was good at that area of law, one which everyone encounters at least once in life. He did not do the work million-dollar lawyers do and he did make millions.
duxup 6y ago
Yeah I know some folks who are attorneys and you mention another lawyer and they don't care, but once they hear where the other attorney works they're suddenly ALL ears. The difference is vast when it comes to the lawyers who I know who are making incredible amounts of money and those who are just... somewhat independent small business folks.
fhrow4484 6y ago
The difference between lawyer jobs and house cleaning jobs, is if suddenly the demand of both jobs surge such that they all pay $500k/year, people could quit their $499k-and-less job today and start their house cleaning job. That's not the case for starting lawyering, you have to: Go to law school, pass the bar, have a set of specialized skills than cleaning doesn't require. This combination of skill and long (and costly...) processs is what keeps lawyer salaries higher.
- MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
  It's why comp sci is still a high paying field. You have to know low level programming, basic circuitry, and how coding works. And the hardest part is you can't bs your way through this field. It's extraordinarily easy to point out someone bluffing on a resume with a simple linked list or binary tree test. With lawyers or business people, it's all about connections.
  - sidlls 6y ago
    > And the hardest part is you can't bs your way through this field. What makes you think that? It's pretty trivial to cram for the coding and design questions, and be a mediocre engineer on a good career trajectory.
Shivetya 6y ago
Well there is that pesky problem where animators and cleaners not being used or existing won't land you in jail or fined beyond your means to pay but having a lawyer can help mitigate or prevent it. we live in a society that is heavily litigated because we have governments at all levels churning out laws and regulations to their benefit and those of their supporters. There are some fields that exist to protect you from physical and financial harm and those will always exist and be desirable until we can eliminate the causes.
- blobbers 6y ago
  Exactly. Watching Gantz, you wait for that moment at the end where something happens and realize you've wasted 10 hours of your life. Accused of a crime? You may realize you've wasted your life in jail because you hired a bad lawyer.
  - imtringued 6y ago
    > You may realize you've wasted your life in jail because you hired a bad lawyer. I thought parent's argument is that you get thrown into jail because you didn't hire any lawyer. It's not that you got a bad lawyer, it's that you must hire one to defend yourself in the first place. Thus there is an always growing need for lawyers, bad or good.
23iofj 6y ago
> There are more law graduates than jobs. But starting salaries haven't gone down. Perhaps this isn't true? It's possible that salaries for lawyers are not going down, but that salaries for law graduates are going down (because not all law grads become lawyers). Also, I thought salaries outside the major firms have cratered? (Or maybe were never all that high to begin with but law school has become crazy expensive and the lower ranked schools are churning out more and more people? IDK.) My local bartender has a JD and passed the bar. He bartends because it pays better.
mrtksn 6y ago
Lawyers don't give away their trade secrets and have something like trade union that is not trade union, unlike engineers and artists. If you want to learn how to solve any engineering problem or how to create an illustration you can choose from ample amount of tutorials that are free or very cheap and teach specifics. If that's not enough, you can ask veterans for guidance and most will happily help you out and even give you specific detailed answers to your problems. People also would be hired based on their performance and no one will ask for diploma if you show performance. On the other hand, if you ask a lawyer they will be extremely vague and would never solve your problem or guide yo without a pay even if the solution is something practical like "Go to the Home Office, find the whatever manager and ask for the hr-103/B form". They also would limit practicing through memberships to professional organisations, limiting the practice only to formally trained lawyers.
milesvp 6y ago
I know someone who did law school career counseling at one point. The glut of lawyers has had a downward pressure on law salaries, but pay and even hiring tends to be highly correlated with the tier of the law school a lawyer grated from. I'm not sure I'd call this class tribalism, so much as a great filter. People who get into top law schools tend to be super competitive and are going to tend to be competent as well, so you're at least partially filtering out people who are likely going to be willing to work for low compensation. If starting pay dropped low enough, these lawyers would be going and getting other jobs. My friend used to laugh about the low end internships complaining about why students weren't rushing to fill their position, and she had to constantly remind them that if their pay was even marginally close to the local minimum wage then her students had better options elsewhere.
foolinaround 6y ago
law and med schools act to limit supply..

ForHackernews 6y ago

Salaries in law are famously bimodal: https://www.biglawinvestor.com/bimodal-salary-distribution-curve/ https://www.biglawinvestor.com/bimodal-salary-distribution-c... Law is a very status-conscious industry (even more than software) and so most of that oversupply of law graduates are not "in the club". They get paid relatively low wages and have to fight with each other for peanuts. Some much smaller fraction of law graduates from top schools or who otherwise have the right connections get paid extremely high salaries because they are only competing with each other.

YinglingLight 6y ago
Journalism weeds itself of those not "in the club" via unpaid or barely paid internships in the highest COL cities.
- ghaff 6y ago
  Journalism is quite different in that most journalists don't make all that much. Also credentialing isn't nearly as big a factor. In fact, a lot of people in the industry look down on J-schools. The common career path among the non-freelance journalists I know at more prestigious publications is knocking around trade pubs and (at least formerly) small city papers before getting their break. (But, yes, connections matter too.)
- ForHackernews 6y ago
  What's the relevance of journalism? It's not a lucrative industry and neither are individual journalists well-paid.
- kevinmchugh 6y ago
  This is pretty recent, I think. There used to be a lot more newspapers with dedicated newsrooms in smaller cities. Carl Bernstein's first job was in Elizabeth, NJ. CJ Chivers started in Providence, RI. Dean Baquet started in NOLA.
  - selimthegrim 6y ago
    That's because Dean Baquet is from NOLA - his family owned Lil' Dizzy's restaurant for years
ghaff 6y ago
There is some middle ground of corporate lawyers and partners at smaller but relatively prosperous practices. But, yes, for the many it's making partner at a white shoe firm which tends to require attending one of a fairly small number of law schools and getting a prestigious clerkship--or you're running ads in the subway. You do get supply demand corrections over time though. If you know you'll be making minimum wage if you didn't go to a top law school a lot of people would stop doing so.
neura 6y ago
There are very few to no situations where your company or reputation or even your way of life depends on your cleaning service. Or another way to look at this is that lawyers get paid based on their reputation. Firms with a high reputation only have the ability to hire so many new lawyers. Those positions are indeed highly sought after, because that's how you get paid well, by getting in with a firm that already has a reputation. You're going to have a hard time starting out on your own, building up a reputation. Hell, sometimes you need to have built enough of a reputation just to get a position with a firm that has a high reputation. While people/companies are looking for the best person/firm they can afford to represent them... cleaners are still just cleaners.

eecc 6y ago

My take is that our (economically) liberal social order refuses to accept interdependence, especially towards the services that guarantee our otherness from our wild state (basically all essential ones such as nurses, garbage, etc) It’s basically a psychological refusal of our vulnerability in the world

dgfitz 6y ago

I believe lawyer salaries (at least in the US) have a bi-modal distribution. [1] Edit: What I mean to say is, the good lawyers make the same good money, the vast majority of lawyers do not. [1] https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib https://www.nalp.org/salarydistrib

aphextron 6y ago
>Edit: What I mean to say is, the good lawyers make the same good money, the vast majority of lawyers do not. It's also not even about being a "good" lawyer. It is completely determined by your law school and GPA. The big firms won't even look at your resume if you're not from a top 10 school.
- dmoy 6y ago
  T13, and with some exceptions (some law firms will draw a top few students from more local law schools, for example, also certain specialties get different treatment). But generally yes. School first, then class rank.
- PaulHoule 6y ago
  The lawyer who helped my mom write her will was a co-worker at a department store before he went to night school and got a law degree. He was good at that area of law, one which everyone encounters at least once in life. He did not do the work million-dollar lawyers do and he did make millions.

duxup 6y ago

Yeah I know some folks who are attorneys and you mention another lawyer and they don't care, but once they hear where the other attorney works they're suddenly ALL ears. The difference is vast when it comes to the lawyers who I know who are making incredible amounts of money and those who are just... somewhat independent small business folks.

fhrow4484 6y ago

The difference between lawyer jobs and house cleaning jobs, is if suddenly the demand of both jobs surge such that they all pay $500k/year, people could quit their $499k-and-less job today and start their house cleaning job. That's not the case for starting lawyering, you have to: Go to law school, pass the bar, have a set of specialized skills than cleaning doesn't require. This combination of skill and long (and costly...) processs is what keeps lawyer salaries higher.

MeinBlutIstBlau 6y ago
It's why comp sci is still a high paying field. You have to know low level programming, basic circuitry, and how coding works. And the hardest part is you can't bs your way through this field. It's extraordinarily easy to point out someone bluffing on a resume with a simple linked list or binary tree test. With lawyers or business people, it's all about connections.
- sidlls 6y ago
  > And the hardest part is you can't bs your way through this field. What makes you think that? It's pretty trivial to cram for the coding and design questions, and be a mediocre engineer on a good career trajectory.

Shivetya 6y ago

Well there is that pesky problem where animators and cleaners not being used or existing won't land you in jail or fined beyond your means to pay but having a lawyer can help mitigate or prevent it. we live in a society that is heavily litigated because we have governments at all levels churning out laws and regulations to their benefit and those of their supporters. There are some fields that exist to protect you from physical and financial harm and those will always exist and be desirable until we can eliminate the causes.

blobbers 6y ago
Exactly. Watching Gantz, you wait for that moment at the end where something happens and realize you've wasted 10 hours of your life. Accused of a crime? You may realize you've wasted your life in jail because you hired a bad lawyer.
- imtringued 6y ago
  > You may realize you've wasted your life in jail because you hired a bad lawyer. I thought parent's argument is that you get thrown into jail because you didn't hire any lawyer. It's not that you got a bad lawyer, it's that you must hire one to defend yourself in the first place. Thus there is an always growing need for lawyers, bad or good.

23iofj 6y ago

> There are more law graduates than jobs. But starting salaries haven't gone down. Perhaps this isn't true? It's possible that salaries for lawyers are not going down, but that salaries for law graduates are going down (because not all law grads become lawyers). Also, I thought salaries outside the major firms have cratered? (Or maybe were never all that high to begin with but law school has become crazy expensive and the lower ranked schools are churning out more and more people? IDK.) My local bartender has a JD and passed the bar. He bartends because it pays better.

mrtksn 6y ago

Lawyers don't give away their trade secrets and have something like trade union that is not trade union, unlike engineers and artists. If you want to learn how to solve any engineering problem or how to create an illustration you can choose from ample amount of tutorials that are free or very cheap and teach specifics. If that's not enough, you can ask veterans for guidance and most will happily help you out and even give you specific detailed answers to your problems. People also would be hired based on their performance and no one will ask for diploma if you show performance. On the other hand, if you ask a lawyer they will be extremely vague and would never solve your problem or guide yo without a pay even if the solution is something practical like "Go to the Home Office, find the whatever manager and ask for the hr-103/B form". They also would limit practicing through memberships to professional organisations, limiting the practice only to formally trained lawyers.

milesvp 6y ago

I know someone who did law school career counseling at one point. The glut of lawyers has had a downward pressure on law salaries, but pay and even hiring tends to be highly correlated with the tier of the law school a lawyer grated from. I'm not sure I'd call this class tribalism, so much as a great filter. People who get into top law schools tend to be super competitive and are going to tend to be competent as well, so you're at least partially filtering out people who are likely going to be willing to work for low compensation. If starting pay dropped low enough, these lawyers would be going and getting other jobs. My friend used to laugh about the low end internships complaining about why students weren't rushing to fill their position, and she had to constantly remind them that if their pay was even marginally close to the local minimum wage then her students had better options elsewhere.

foolinaround 6y ago

law and med schools act to limit supply..