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"These salaries are middle class salaries in the Bay Area and barely enough to buy a house in some of the poorer areas." Whether someone can afford a house or
by apsec112 13y ago
"These salaries are middle class salaries in the Bay Area and barely enough to buy a house in some of the poorer areas."
Whether someone can afford a house or not has nothing to do with what market rate for work should be.
"One of the biggest divergences between the Daddy Model and reality is the valuation of hard work. In the Daddy Model, hard work is in itself deserving. In reality, wealth is measured by what one delivers, not how much effort it costs. If I paint someone's house, the owner shouldn't pay me extra for doing it with a toothbrush.
It will seem to someone still implicitly operating on the Daddy Model that it is unfair when someone works hard and doesn't get paid much. To help clarify the matter, get rid of everyone else and put our worker on a desert island, hunting and gathering fruit. If he's bad at it he'll work very hard and not end up with much food. Is this unfair? Who is being unfair to him?" - http://paulgraham.com/gap.html http://paulgraham.com/gap.html
- btipling 13y agoThe mental gymnastics between perceived value of what these individuals do and the actual value (and damage the strike is doing to the local economy) do not match. It doesn't matter if you think these people are just pushing buttons. BART isn't running, and that immense value is not being provided. It also doesn't matter what people think these people should earn. It's what BART is willing to pay, and what employees are willing to accept to work there.
- apsec112 13y agoWhen a service is both essential and a natural monopoly, employees extracting all of the "immense value being provided" is very, very bad. Suppose the employees of SF's water company were allowed to charge the full value provided by delivering water to San Francisco. People can't do without water, and so everyone's water bill would now be thousands of dollars a month, since they have no alternative but to pay it. And the next week, everyone would realize this sucked and anyone who was able to would leave.
- moneyrich 13y agocost of living does have something to do with salaries. theres a symbiosis between the salary and the prices of houses in a supply and demand model: what people are willing to pay.