4 ms·

Price discrimination is efficient. You don't have to like it, but you can't claim it isn't. Your claim that wages being below someone else's is "societally har

Price discrimination is efficient. You don't have to like it, but you can't claim it isn't. Your claim that wages being below someone else's is "societally harmful" requires some proof beyond your intuition. This is not a method of cutting all wages in the country, it is a method of directing wages to higher productivity workers. It only shifts relative amounts. Just as we expect a cleaner to be paid less than the software engineer whose cubicle is being cleaned, there is no "societal" objection to the 3x engineer being paid more than the 2x engineer.

et-al 4y ago
Following your example, we should make wages transparent. So that way the 3x engineers know they're being correctly compensated by management, right?
- fn-mote 4y ago
  I can't tell if this is a sarcastic suggestion or not. This might be controversial in the private sector, but wage transparency is the norm in the public sector in my area of the world... and many people are employed in those positions.
Dylan16807 4y ago
When it comes to splitting up surplus value in a transaction, being efficient for one party means being inefficient for the other party. So I absolutely can claim it's not efficient, by not implicitly favoring the employer over the employee. And we're not changing the number of transactions here with these wage calculations.
- abigail95 4y ago
  > changing the number of transactions you absolutely are, that's the whole point of it being more efficient. the pie grows and everyone wins. you are also starting the story in the middle. there is no two parties haggling value. there is a market of providers and a market of sellers. Uber/Lyft/DiDi all compete for drivers by offering bids to drivers. Drivers pick the highest bid. What's the inefficiency here? the value from gig work and ride sharing, like nearly every single normal economic act is not fucking zero sum.
  - Dylan16807 4y ago
    If you manage to always offer drivers the minimum they will accept, you don't grow the pie, you just take more of it. > Uber/Lyft/DiDi all compete for drivers by offering bids to drivers. Drivers pick the highest bid. What's the inefficiency here? The inefficiency is when there aren't plentiful rides from multiple platforms, so the competition part goes away. > the value from gig work and ride sharing, like nearly every single normal economic act is not fucking zero sum. The value of the work isn't zero sum but the way the surplus is distributed is often zero sum. Though if a worker is aiming for a specific amount of profit, and you manage to cut their pay to get more hours out of them, it's not zero sum but the effect on the worker is even worse.

et-al 4y ago

Following your example, we should make wages transparent. So that way the 3x engineers know they're being correctly compensated by management, right?

fn-mote 4y ago
I can't tell if this is a sarcastic suggestion or not. This might be controversial in the private sector, but wage transparency is the norm in the public sector in my area of the world... and many people are employed in those positions.

Dylan16807 4y ago

When it comes to splitting up surplus value in a transaction, being efficient for one party means being inefficient for the other party. So I absolutely can claim it's not efficient, by not implicitly favoring the employer over the employee. And we're not changing the number of transactions here with these wage calculations.

abigail95 4y ago
> changing the number of transactions you absolutely are, that's the whole point of it being more efficient. the pie grows and everyone wins. you are also starting the story in the middle. there is no two parties haggling value. there is a market of providers and a market of sellers. Uber/Lyft/DiDi all compete for drivers by offering bids to drivers. Drivers pick the highest bid. What's the inefficiency here? the value from gig work and ride sharing, like nearly every single normal economic act is not fucking zero sum.
- Dylan16807 4y ago
  If you manage to always offer drivers the minimum they will accept, you don't grow the pie, you just take more of it. > Uber/Lyft/DiDi all compete for drivers by offering bids to drivers. Drivers pick the highest bid. What's the inefficiency here? The inefficiency is when there aren't plentiful rides from multiple platforms, so the competition part goes away. > the value from gig work and ride sharing, like nearly every single normal economic act is not fucking zero sum. The value of the work isn't zero sum but the way the surplus is distributed is often zero sum. Though if a worker is aiming for a specific amount of profit, and you manage to cut their pay to get more hours out of them, it's not zero sum but the effect on the worker is even worse.