Which professions are paid too much given their value to society?
80000hours.org
80000hours.org
IMO -- this kind of data could/should benefit teachers and researchers who want to argue that their benefit to society isn't reflected in the existing high school/undergrad/graduate metrics. Instead of paying teachers/researchers the wage that reflects an equilibrium between available supply and job demand, maybe we could offer something that offsets their (positive) externality. I suppose it only makes sense for public schools since private entities aren't focused on things like this. But there's a lot of debate over public school funding and this seems like a great input to that debate.
This is an impoverished view of the value of education (from the paper you linked): "We calculate the social product of teaching as the impact of an additional year of schooling on aggregate earnings of all workers in the economy. The spillover from teaching is then this social product less the annual earnings of all teachers."
Prisons and wars increase GDP but make us worse off. Likewise, many free apps (e.g. Google Maps) significantly improve our lives but don't significantly impact GDP.
This matters because the approach used to measure externalities may undervalue software engineers and teachers and overvalue defense contractors and lobbyists.
Edit: This is really important for software. Software has low marginal cost so the market price (and therefore measured GDP) trends towards 0 but the (mostly unmeasured) consumer surplus is huge.
Another Edit: Note that externalities for defense contractors and lobbyists actually weren't measured here and probably couldn't be reliably measured with this technique due to international differences, but they made great examples for my explanation.
Why does a bartender at a bar that isn't very busy who simply pours me a draft beer out of a tap deserve a dollar when a guy making burritos at Chipotle during the lunch rush who can't take a break for 3 hours straight doesn't get any tips? I've had bartenders hand me a can of beer for 2 dollars, I come back 20 minutes later and ask for another and they say "ok but I'm going to charge you extra because you didn't tip".
If I ever did that when I worked at any fast food job I've ever had I would have been fired.
Either have a tipping culture or don't, but don't have social punishments for skipping tipping on bartenders or restaurant waiters but then don't tip me EVER when I work a different minimum wage job that can be just as hectic.
Many bartenders and waiters take the approach of tipping constantly at other low paying service jobs, which is very admirable.
But others will berate you if you mention that you don't tip for every drink at a bar while they themselves see no hypocrisy or problem that they aren't tipping low paid workers in other industries.
Before someone mentions that some of those tipping jobs can have pay that's less than minimum wage - remember that if tips don't make up the difference then the employer is legally required to pay the minimum wage for that shift.
Right because if you're getting paid $2/hr + tips and make less than min wage because you didn't get tipped, you sure have the means to file a lawsuit.
If you can't afford to tip, you can't afford to eat out.
Sure, if you only go to places where it is proper to tip, but there are plenty of places to eat out where NOT tipping is appropriate.
I believe that tipping should be based on the level of service provided, not on the financial status/need of either the provider or the consumer. If I'm getting takeout, I rarely tip more than a dollar. If it's a place where I bus my own table and pickup my food at the counter, I don't tip at all. On numerous occasions where I felt I got wonderful service, I've tipped $20 on a 10 dollar meal. Generally, I'll tip 15% - 20% based on service level.
Hospital nurses in UK, they perform life saving work and paid rubbish money.
NHS pay rates are here: https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/about/careers-nhs/nhs-pay-a...
Registered nurses are on band 5 and start at the bottom (22k GBP). They move up a point every year.
No band 5 nurses in the UK make six figures.
- nurses pay around 500 gbp per year for their nursing pin (registration) and union membership, which is required for insurance purposes
- nhs pensions take out a further 7%
Buying a house is the biggest list of "fees" I've ever seen in my life. I felt so nickel-and-dimed with random $50-500 fees tacked onto every part of the transaction. My mom just sold a condo as well, same thing with tons of superfluous random fees throughout the process on that side of the transaction.
A friend of mine, who is a really nice guy, so I don't hold this against him at all, but was kind of flopping in his career until his early 30s. Started as a real estate agent out of the blue in the Seattle market a few years back. Is now making 2-3x more than most of us. I'm happy to see him successful, but I also take this as an example of the job having pretty low barrier to entry to make a lot of money.
* a little caveat: I am little bit bitter about the process and the "locking out" I faced. One real estate agent even told me this up front, which I was like "Dude you know I could report you for saying this and you could lose your license right?" But alas I just shook my head and carried on.
Is it typical in the US for a buyer to have an estate agent too? If so, why? If not, I don't understand what this means.
Where I'm from, typically only the seller would have an estate agent.
So... I can not have a buyer's agent and pay for it anyways. Or I can have an agent. The only advantage of having an agent is that getting showings is a little easier and you spend less time on the phone.
Houses have showings on Saturday/Sunday and offers are in on Monday in hot markets. There is no time to negotiate reducing the price in exchange for not using a buyers agent. If you have a complicated offer it might not get selected. People are waving inspection and financing contingencies in some markets.
I think it more or less comes down to buyers and sellers being kind of stupid. Heck... just about everyone I dealt with throughout the process was kind of stupid. The lender (at least the one I finally ended up with) and home inspector were both competent. Everyone else demonstrated they had no idea how to do their job.
I walked into so many houses with rat poop and dead insects everywhere. Houses were priced and bid on with only a weak correlation between the location and quality of the house and what people offered. It's obvious neither the buyers or the sellers knew whether what they were looking at was any good and major deficiencies were not being priced in. A house could be right next to an active commuter rail (not a stop, just the track) and it wouldn't be reflected in the price!
While I definitely agree that the amount of money realtors get for selling a home is ridiculously high, the above statement is definitely NOT true (and I've sold several homes through a realtor).
Realty is often a more risky business than people think. People often only focus on the houses that sell quickly, not the ones that sit for a long time. A realtor can invest many hours in selling a home and get nothing if it doesn't sell. I had a home on the market more than a year (and it was a fairly new, nice home at a reasonable price, it was just a bad time to sell). We gave up, and if it had not been for a deal that came up a short while later, my realtor would have gotten nothing for that year's worth of effort (I had negotiated commission with her originally, due to her selling the home I was originally interested in, and I re-negotiated commission on the second deal).
Again, I'm not saying that the commissions aren't too high -- they are. And it is a lucrative business if you want to spend all of your weekends and evenings showing houses. Personally I think it's a good short-term career for young people who are single. Money isn't everything, and I would not even consider doing the job as a married person.
Also, not all realtors are made equal. There are a lot of them that put as little effort as possible into selling your home, and just hope that realtor.com listings will get them a buyer without putting much into it. However, the best realtors do put work into selling your home, and their network and ability to find buyers is of value. I just don't think it is worth what they charge for it. But, then again, given the hours/days they have to work, I guess I'd want to be paid very well if I was doing it.
In some ways it is a bit like doctors (talking about in the U. S. here) -- it takes a long time to go through med school, and many come out up to their necks in debt, so by the time they are done with residency they feel they have earned the high fees they get paid (and/or they just need them so they can get out of debt and finally be profitable). Of course the medical profession is a complicated mess, so there's more to it than that.
A good manager on the right project can make a huge contribution to that project's success. Ditto a good senior leader running a large organisation. I have no problem with these people being compensated accordingly.
However, many people in management positions aren't particularly good at it, yet still command compensation as if they were.
In far too many cases, a manager is even making their organisation less effective overall than if they just left and let the people doing the work figure something out between them, yet still commanding that high compensation.
Personally I find the results presented surprising - especially the claim of research being worth 25% of GDP, which seems very high to me.
Dentistry is a great example that forbids even simple procedures to be done by non certified practitioners.