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> Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United S

by jl2718 5y ago

> Alan Greenspan, former chairman of the Federal Reserve, said as much when in 2007 he advocated boosting the number of skilled immigrants entering the United States so as to "suppress" the wages of their U.S. counterparts, which he considered too high. We vote for these people and pay their salaries. Who exactly is it that is supposed to be looking out for us?

spamizbad 5y ago
Most voters - and donors - aren't highly skilled engineers. But politicians are judged on their overall stewardship of the economy. Anyway, the US voter is weird; they think all sorts of professions are overpaid. Why should a bunch of nerds sitting at a desk make six figures? With that said, that might be changing - it might be shifting more towards overall worker outcomes over just the stock market.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  Indeed. People think it is crazy that government software engineers make 80K for "typing."
- jl2718 5y ago
  Oh yeah because they did such a great job at raising median citizen wages too. What is this ‘economy’ that they are such great stewards of? Who owns it?
- iso1631 5y ago
  > Anyway, the US voter is weird; they think all sorts of professions are overpaid. Why should a bunch of nerds sitting at a desk make six figures? But oddly enough not PE teachers, who tend to be the highest paid public employees in the state -- https://247wallst.com/special-report/2020/09/21/these-are-the-highest-paid-public-employees-in-every-state-2/2/ https://247wallst.com/special-report/2020/09/21/these-are-th...
  - meetups323 5y ago
    Don't be disingenuous. PE teachers and football coaches are not the same at all and you know it. Football coaches bring in literal millions in revenue, your Alabama example costs 8MM/year in salary but returns around 150MM in sponsorship/ad revenue/donations/etc. https://www.businessinsider.com/schools-most-revenue-college-sports-2016-10#5-alabama--1489-million-21 https://www.businessinsider.com/schools-most-revenue-college...
    - JohnWhigham 5y ago
      And those are the best of the best. Go look at a middling D2/D3 school's football coach salary. Guarantee it won't be as impressive. And then remember that they also have a staff of position coaches and whatnot under them.
      - iso1631 5y ago
        > And then remember that they also have a staff of position coaches and whatnot under them. And people wonder why there's a STEM crisis. When your society had decided it's more important to employ multiple full time extra curricular activity coaches for a high school while cutting STEM investment (and thus outsourcing the function) you're on the fast track to the bottom of the pile.
  - ktkoffroth 5y ago
    Are you really going to label Head Coaches of major sports programs as PE teachers? The reason they are paid highly is because they carry the majority of responsibility in the success of sports teams, which generate revenue (in the hundreds of millions in the case of Football and Basketball) for the athletic departments of these universities. That revenue is used to fund literally every other collegiate sport, and provide scholarships to tens of thousands of students nationally. These positions are unique because they are simultaneously extremely competitive (most coaches are fired within 5 years) and tied (loosely) to a public entity. To call them PE teachers is a ridiculous presumption, no matter how overpaid you believe they are (and rightly so).
- JohnWhigham 5y ago
  There's large swaths of Republicans that think public teachers are overpaid...it's mind-boggling.
  - DaveExeter 5y ago
    In certain areas, public school teachers are incredibly overpaid! $1k+/day compensation for the elementary school 'art teacher' is far above reasonable. But politicians get power by robbing Peter to make Paul rich!
    - handrous 5y ago
      Where the hell are art teachers making $20,000/month?
      - blululu 5y ago
        120k per year is not unreasonable for teachers if you start counting benefits as wages. The pension plans of most public school teachers are generous, special tax breaks are effectively a form of salary. In California the school teachers are exempt from social security. These don’t show up in the nominal salary, but it is still money paid to them (some of it indirectly).
        JohnWhigham 5y ago
        I would love to see exactly how many public school teachers are actually getting 120k. I'm very certain they are at the very high end and very few in number. Most are getting slightly above the national median income.
        mrtranscendence 5y ago
        Depends on your area. Teachers where I'm from (greater Cincinnati) don't get anywhere near 120k even with many years of experience. My brother in northern Kentucky gets $55k after 15 years. In New York state average pay shoots up to highest-in-the-nation $85k (source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/teacher-pay-by-state https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/teacher-pay...). Maybe someone with a lot of experience in certain specific areas could make $120k, but it's not going to be common.
- LorenPechtel 5y ago
  Yup. 15-20 years ago, factory floor, troubleshooting a problem that only showed up in production. I overheard a couple of guys saying that I was overpaid for being able to type fast, especially as I spent most of my time just standing there.
fabianhjr 5y ago
> Who exactly is it that is supposed to be looking out for us? They are looking out for buisness-owner interests (capital interests)
whywhywhywhy 5y ago
> Who exactly is it that is supposed to be looking out for us? I mean... if Greenspan has been the chairman of the Federal Reserve then almost his entire career has been focused on disempowering you and keeping you in your place. Why would helping and empowering tax payers be something anyone in government would ever want, you'd lose your slave class if they could actually build wealth and be in control of their own destiny. Much better keeping them living paycheck to paycheck and scooping off the cream then chip away at their savings while you're at it to keep those from stacking too high too.
lr4444lr 5y ago
The Federal Reserve has 2 missions: stable dollar, low unemployment. That's all. They have a powerful and limited set of levers to do this.
- spaetzleesser 5y ago
  I think lately it has been more about keeping the investment class happy.
tarr11 5y ago
Here is the quote from Alan Greenspan: "Yes, there are options to combat that decline, but contrary to what many people believe, we do very poorly in opening up our borders to skilled immigrants. Our H1-B visa restrictions are a disgrace. Most high-income people in our country do not realize that their incomes are being subsidized by their protection from competition from highly skilled people who are prevented from immigrating to the United States. But we need such skills in order to staff our productive economy, so that the standard of living for Americans as a whole can grow." https://www.theglobalist.com/globalist-interview-with-alan-greenspan-should-jobs-matter-in-the-u-s-trade-debate/ https://www.theglobalist.com/globalist-interview-with-alan-g...
- hannasanarion 5y ago
  The standard of living for Americans doesn't depend on the pay rate of software engineers. The profit margins of software companies are already astonishingly high. No tech firm is buckling under the weight of their payroll, they are making bank. Google's 2nd quarter financials show a 64% operating profit. Arguably there isn't enough money from these companies going back to the people who actually did the work to generate that success. They could start paying everybody double and still be making more money than any other market sector could dream of. Depressing the wages of software engineers doesn't mean increased standard of living for Americans, it can only mean increased profit margins for stockholders.
  - petersellers 5y ago
    The point is that by allowing more highly-skilled immigrants into the country, it enables many other companies to make use of that high-skill labor and increase productivity (which would increase our standard of living, in theory). The lowering of wages is only a side effect of that.
    - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
      Why do the companies have to be in the US? Why can't they be in Mexico or India or Brazil - and US investors just invest in those companies and get the resulting dividends? Why does the company have to exist in the US for us to get any benefits of increased productivity?
fiftyfifty 5y ago
Funny how they never talk about doing this with medical doctors, or expanding the number of medical schools. I guess their wages aren't considered too high, despite the insane costs of medical treatment in the US. Engineers need a stronger lobby, see the AMA for an example apparently.
- thinkharderdev 5y ago
  Counterpoint: the ridiculous cost of medical care in the US is (in part) BECAUSE of the AMA and it is bad for the vast majority of Americans who are not Doctors. We should be looking to make medicine more like SWE, not the other way around.
Eridrus 5y ago
Why should the government be protecting software engineers from competition at the cost of other people who would pay a higher price for our labor?
- jdgoesmarching 5y ago
  Most people have the idea that the job of a government is to make conditions better for its citizens.
  - Eridrus 5y ago
    Even if you accept the premise that the only responsibility a government has is to its citizens (which I do not), the interests of citizens are usually often in conflict with one another.
renewiltord 5y ago
They are looking out for the collective us not for any subgroup. If you think about it, there’s lots of ways to make subgroups wealthier at the expense of America herself. Subsidies are one such tool. Tariffs are another. He was right, you know, and fortunately the H1B helped with the growth of the American tech economy - which benefited all Americans far more than if it had been delayed (or worse, taken from us by others). There is a ride in the affairs of men, and they managed to take it at its flood.
- jl2718 5y ago
  How exactly do you know that it helped? What evidence can you point to that says the whole tech boom would have gone to Trans-Dniester otherwise? Doctor salaries are massively inflated by limiting supply even within the country. That must mean that the entire medical industry has already moved to India.
  - renewiltord 5y ago
    Well, far away doctors don’t compete with local doctors. But far away search engines sure compete with local search engines. And yes, the doctor supply limit is costing the country substantially. It’s a tax on everyone else that is then distributed to a certain professional class. It is no surprise that that professional class lobbies for it. But it’s bad for the rest of us.
  - shagie 5y ago
    Things that can be done remotely may already be there. Radiology has experienced a bit of outsourcing... complete with its own set of challenges.
fullshark 5y ago
The populists, even though they induce a gag reflex from our years of aspirational cultural conditioning, are the only option at the moment.
raziel2701 5y ago
We actually don't vote for the chair of the Federal Reserve (currently Jerome Powell) and that's a problem. These people have an outsized influence in our lives and they're not publicly elected.
failuser 5y ago
Why would he be looking out for you? How much lobbing money did you spend on him? Did you pay millions for his speeches?

by jl2718 5y ago

spamizbad 5y ago

Most voters - and donors - aren't highly skilled engineers. But politicians are judged on their overall stewardship of the economy. Anyway, the US voter is weird; they think all sorts of professions are overpaid. Why should a bunch of nerds sitting at a desk make six figures? With that said, that might be changing - it might be shifting more towards overall worker outcomes over just the stock market.

MattGaiser 5y ago
Indeed. People think it is crazy that government software engineers make 80K for "typing."
jl2718 5y ago
Oh yeah because they did such a great job at raising median citizen wages too. What is this ‘economy’ that they are such great stewards of? Who owns it?
iso1631 5y ago
> Anyway, the US voter is weird; they think all sorts of professions are overpaid. Why should a bunch of nerds sitting at a desk make six figures? But oddly enough not PE teachers, who tend to be the highest paid public employees in the state -- https://247wallst.com/special-report/2020/09/21/these-are-the-highest-paid-public-employees-in-every-state-2/2/ https://247wallst.com/special-report/2020/09/21/these-are-th...
- meetups323 5y ago
  Don't be disingenuous. PE teachers and football coaches are not the same at all and you know it. Football coaches bring in literal millions in revenue, your Alabama example costs 8MM/year in salary but returns around 150MM in sponsorship/ad revenue/donations/etc. https://www.businessinsider.com/schools-most-revenue-college-sports-2016-10#5-alabama--1489-million-21 https://www.businessinsider.com/schools-most-revenue-college...
  - JohnWhigham 5y ago
    And those are the best of the best. Go look at a middling D2/D3 school's football coach salary. Guarantee it won't be as impressive. And then remember that they also have a staff of position coaches and whatnot under them.
    - iso1631 5y ago
      > And then remember that they also have a staff of position coaches and whatnot under them. And people wonder why there's a STEM crisis. When your society had decided it's more important to employ multiple full time extra curricular activity coaches for a high school while cutting STEM investment (and thus outsourcing the function) you're on the fast track to the bottom of the pile.
- ktkoffroth 5y ago
  Are you really going to label Head Coaches of major sports programs as PE teachers? The reason they are paid highly is because they carry the majority of responsibility in the success of sports teams, which generate revenue (in the hundreds of millions in the case of Football and Basketball) for the athletic departments of these universities. That revenue is used to fund literally every other collegiate sport, and provide scholarships to tens of thousands of students nationally. These positions are unique because they are simultaneously extremely competitive (most coaches are fired within 5 years) and tied (loosely) to a public entity. To call them PE teachers is a ridiculous presumption, no matter how overpaid you believe they are (and rightly so).
JohnWhigham 5y ago
There's large swaths of Republicans that think public teachers are overpaid...it's mind-boggling.
- DaveExeter 5y ago
  In certain areas, public school teachers are incredibly overpaid! $1k+/day compensation for the elementary school 'art teacher' is far above reasonable. But politicians get power by robbing Peter to make Paul rich!
  - handrous 5y ago
    Where the hell are art teachers making $20,000/month?
    - blululu 5y ago
      120k per year is not unreasonable for teachers if you start counting benefits as wages. The pension plans of most public school teachers are generous, special tax breaks are effectively a form of salary. In California the school teachers are exempt from social security. These don’t show up in the nominal salary, but it is still money paid to them (some of it indirectly).
      - JohnWhigham 5y ago
        I would love to see exactly how many public school teachers are actually getting 120k. I'm very certain they are at the very high end and very few in number. Most are getting slightly above the national median income.
        mrtranscendence 5y ago
        Depends on your area. Teachers where I'm from (greater Cincinnati) don't get anywhere near 120k even with many years of experience. My brother in northern Kentucky gets $55k after 15 years. In New York state average pay shoots up to highest-in-the-nation $85k (source: https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/teacher-pay-by-state https://worldpopulationreview.com/state-rankings/teacher-pay...). Maybe someone with a lot of experience in certain specific areas could make $120k, but it's not going to be common.
LorenPechtel 5y ago
Yup. 15-20 years ago, factory floor, troubleshooting a problem that only showed up in production. I overheard a couple of guys saying that I was overpaid for being able to type fast, especially as I spent most of my time just standing there.

fabianhjr 5y ago

> Who exactly is it that is supposed to be looking out for us? They are looking out for buisness-owner interests (capital interests)

whywhywhywhy 5y ago

> Who exactly is it that is supposed to be looking out for us? I mean... if Greenspan has been the chairman of the Federal Reserve then almost his entire career has been focused on disempowering you and keeping you in your place. Why would helping and empowering tax payers be something anyone in government would ever want, you'd lose your slave class if they could actually build wealth and be in control of their own destiny. Much better keeping them living paycheck to paycheck and scooping off the cream then chip away at their savings while you're at it to keep those from stacking too high too.

lr4444lr 5y ago

The Federal Reserve has 2 missions: stable dollar, low unemployment. That's all. They have a powerful and limited set of levers to do this.

spaetzleesser 5y ago
I think lately it has been more about keeping the investment class happy.

tarr11 5y ago

Here is the quote from Alan Greenspan: "Yes, there are options to combat that decline, but contrary to what many people believe, we do very poorly in opening up our borders to skilled immigrants. Our H1-B visa restrictions are a disgrace. Most high-income people in our country do not realize that their incomes are being subsidized by their protection from competition from highly skilled people who are prevented from immigrating to the United States. But we need such skills in order to staff our productive economy, so that the standard of living for Americans as a whole can grow." https://www.theglobalist.com/globalist-interview-with-alan-greenspan-should-jobs-matter-in-the-u-s-trade-debate/ https://www.theglobalist.com/globalist-interview-with-alan-g...

hannasanarion 5y ago
The standard of living for Americans doesn't depend on the pay rate of software engineers. The profit margins of software companies are already astonishingly high. No tech firm is buckling under the weight of their payroll, they are making bank. Google's 2nd quarter financials show a 64% operating profit. Arguably there isn't enough money from these companies going back to the people who actually did the work to generate that success. They could start paying everybody double and still be making more money than any other market sector could dream of. Depressing the wages of software engineers doesn't mean increased standard of living for Americans, it can only mean increased profit margins for stockholders.
- petersellers 5y ago
  The point is that by allowing more highly-skilled immigrants into the country, it enables many other companies to make use of that high-skill labor and increase productivity (which would increase our standard of living, in theory). The lowering of wages is only a side effect of that.
  - onlyrealcuzzo 5y ago
    Why do the companies have to be in the US? Why can't they be in Mexico or India or Brazil - and US investors just invest in those companies and get the resulting dividends? Why does the company have to exist in the US for us to get any benefits of increased productivity?

fiftyfifty 5y ago

Funny how they never talk about doing this with medical doctors, or expanding the number of medical schools. I guess their wages aren't considered too high, despite the insane costs of medical treatment in the US. Engineers need a stronger lobby, see the AMA for an example apparently.

thinkharderdev 5y ago
Counterpoint: the ridiculous cost of medical care in the US is (in part) BECAUSE of the AMA and it is bad for the vast majority of Americans who are not Doctors. We should be looking to make medicine more like SWE, not the other way around.

Eridrus 5y ago

Why should the government be protecting software engineers from competition at the cost of other people who would pay a higher price for our labor?

jdgoesmarching 5y ago
Most people have the idea that the job of a government is to make conditions better for its citizens.
- Eridrus 5y ago
  Even if you accept the premise that the only responsibility a government has is to its citizens (which I do not), the interests of citizens are usually often in conflict with one another.

renewiltord 5y ago

They are looking out for the collective us not for any subgroup. If you think about it, there’s lots of ways to make subgroups wealthier at the expense of America herself. Subsidies are one such tool. Tariffs are another. He was right, you know, and fortunately the H1B helped with the growth of the American tech economy - which benefited all Americans far more than if it had been delayed (or worse, taken from us by others). There is a ride in the affairs of men, and they managed to take it at its flood.

jl2718 5y ago
How exactly do you know that it helped? What evidence can you point to that says the whole tech boom would have gone to Trans-Dniester otherwise? Doctor salaries are massively inflated by limiting supply even within the country. That must mean that the entire medical industry has already moved to India.
- renewiltord 5y ago
  Well, far away doctors don’t compete with local doctors. But far away search engines sure compete with local search engines. And yes, the doctor supply limit is costing the country substantially. It’s a tax on everyone else that is then distributed to a certain professional class. It is no surprise that that professional class lobbies for it. But it’s bad for the rest of us.
- shagie 5y ago
  Things that can be done remotely may already be there. Radiology has experienced a bit of outsourcing... complete with its own set of challenges.

fullshark 5y ago

The populists, even though they induce a gag reflex from our years of aspirational cultural conditioning, are the only option at the moment.

raziel2701 5y ago

We actually don't vote for the chair of the Federal Reserve (currently Jerome Powell) and that's a problem. These people have an outsized influence in our lives and they're not publicly elected.

failuser 5y ago

Why would he be looking out for you? How much lobbing money did you spend on him? Did you pay millions for his speeches?