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Why should some workers gets paid vastly more than others for the same job? That isn't sustainable at all. Most places that hires janitors can't afford to pay a

Why should some workers gets paid vastly more than others for the same job? That isn't sustainable at all. Most places that hires janitors can't afford to pay anyone at the company even close to what facebook pays its engineers, it doesn't make sense that a few privileged janitors gets facebook engineering salary when most of them gets a small fraction of that. People who comes up with those arguments just haven't thought things through.

danbruc 5y ago
Lets separate two things, what is fair payment on the one hand and on the other hand how this might be achieved. For the first question I already stated my position, I think it is unfair to have the supply and demand situation heavily affect your wage, especially if an oversupply of workers is used to lower wages for hard or unpleasant jobs. For the second question I will admit that my initial comment sounds like it is an easy thing to do but you are right that I can not provide some policies that if implemented would yield my desired outcome. But you should also not take my comment to literally, I do not want a better wage for the janitors at Facebook but for menial work in general. So as a first step at least have a minimum wage that ensures that you are not living at the verge of poverty if you work full time. That is certainly a far cry from achieving what my initial comment asked for but it is better than nothing and as I said, I unfortunately do not know how to get there.
- lordnacho 5y ago
  The problem with that is if you don't let the supply and demand price be the price, you create other issues. Like what to do about the excess or undersupply of whatever you are looking at. I'm not denying that the price can seem wrong. Who really thinks that sports stars ought to make 20x what a doctor makes?
  - danbruc 5y ago
    The problem is in my opinion that the price fulfills too many tasks at once, it is a measure of work and resources required for the production of goods, it is used as measure of value or utility a consumer assigns to the goods, it is used to decide how goods of limited supply are distributed, and there may be more things upon careful inspection. The problem is that those aspects do not align in a good way all the time and that there are no or no strong enough forces to fix this.
medvezhenok 5y ago
Look at pay scales in the former Soviet Union. In demand workers were still paid more but the state guaranteed a job for everyone and poverty was quite low - and average difference between a well-to-do person and a working class person was not huge (though I guess the living arrangements back then could be considered "poverty" today). Labor / Other salaries are always a choice (although the USSR experienced lots of brain drain because of their choices, so maybe it doesn't work too well with open borders) (even though there were many other problems, and eventually the planned economy bit and large foreign-denominated loans backed by plummeting oil made the whole thing collapse like a house of cards)
- esyir 5y ago
  This sounds to me exactly like a nice-sounding in the short-term but ultimately unsustainable system to me. That some of the most anti-socialist places in the world are ex-territories of the soviet union doesn't give me much confidence in the soviet way there.

danbruc 5y ago

Lets separate two things, what is fair payment on the one hand and on the other hand how this might be achieved. For the first question I already stated my position, I think it is unfair to have the supply and demand situation heavily affect your wage, especially if an oversupply of workers is used to lower wages for hard or unpleasant jobs. For the second question I will admit that my initial comment sounds like it is an easy thing to do but you are right that I can not provide some policies that if implemented would yield my desired outcome. But you should also not take my comment to literally, I do not want a better wage for the janitors at Facebook but for menial work in general. So as a first step at least have a minimum wage that ensures that you are not living at the verge of poverty if you work full time. That is certainly a far cry from achieving what my initial comment asked for but it is better than nothing and as I said, I unfortunately do not know how to get there.

lordnacho 5y ago
The problem with that is if you don't let the supply and demand price be the price, you create other issues. Like what to do about the excess or undersupply of whatever you are looking at. I'm not denying that the price can seem wrong. Who really thinks that sports stars ought to make 20x what a doctor makes?
- danbruc 5y ago
  The problem is in my opinion that the price fulfills too many tasks at once, it is a measure of work and resources required for the production of goods, it is used as measure of value or utility a consumer assigns to the goods, it is used to decide how goods of limited supply are distributed, and there may be more things upon careful inspection. The problem is that those aspects do not align in a good way all the time and that there are no or no strong enough forces to fix this.

medvezhenok 5y ago

Look at pay scales in the former Soviet Union. In demand workers were still paid more but the state guaranteed a job for everyone and poverty was quite low - and average difference between a well-to-do person and a working class person was not huge (though I guess the living arrangements back then could be considered "poverty" today). Labor / Other salaries are always a choice (although the USSR experienced lots of brain drain because of their choices, so maybe it doesn't work too well with open borders) (even though there were many other problems, and eventually the planned economy bit and large foreign-denominated loans backed by plummeting oil made the whole thing collapse like a house of cards)

esyir 5y ago
This sounds to me exactly like a nice-sounding in the short-term but ultimately unsustainable system to me. That some of the most anti-socialist places in the world are ex-territories of the soviet union doesn't give me much confidence in the soviet way there.