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Comment by mcfunk | Hacker News Reader

The framing of this is all wrong. The problem isn't that developers are overpaid, it's that other industries' laborers have had their work systematically undervalued, all the way down to people performing essential services who can't afford to feed their families on full-time work.

However you want to argue about payment/wealth being a problem, ultimately, the idea that workers being compensated "too much" (when definitionally they aren't making as much as their labor's value creates) is the productive thing to focus on is very unhelpful.

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>all the way down to people performing essential services who can't afford to feed their families on full-time work.

This is a feature of the system, not a bug. If these folks weren't barely making it, there'd be more free energy for rentiers to extract through various rent-seeking behavior, and since rentiers have significantly more political power, the system would get subtly worse for the everyman in whatever ways have the least-bad optics until they're barely making it again.

Like, this is why the SF Bay Area has the zoning-caused housing crisis: because it can afford to.

Can we strike at the root and try to reduce rent-seeking behavior? Even if we can't eliminate it, there was a time when 'usury' an ugly moral sin and Jubilee was an actual event, so at least we understood who the jerks were, instead of blaming ourselves for being indentured servants in a rigged system.

IMO it's gotten too sophisticated to tackle head-on. Back then, if you were getting screwed, at least you knew how and by whom. Now, the vast majority of people who really understand how any particular rent-seeking scheme works are the rentiers themselves, so any public policy debate quickly devolves into a mix of noise and actual malice.

I initially mistook your first comment for defending a broken system (don't know how I could have done that), but this is just beautifully cynical. I buy your reasoning, and the state of things is actually quite tragic.

Most people who understand how this works will think "okay, so this is broken, but how can I profit from this?" rather than focus their energies on how the system can be fixed. The former is much easier to accomplish.

> Most people who understand how this works will think "okay, so this is broken, but how can I profit from this?" rather than focus their energies on how the system can be fixed. The former is much easier to accomplish.

Taking that cynicism one step further: I don't think it is about ease or difficulty of either approach. Rather, those who understand the system also typically understand the human nature, particularly its lust for power, which prohibits any system from being truly fixed. Because any system is going to be gamed by someone to accumulate power for themselves (or their inner circles). So why not apply your insights for your own benefits?

This is true. The problem is that most jobs have had stagnant wages for decades and developers are an exception. That is where the guilt comes from. But we need income growth like we need other kinds of growth. The transition to carbon free economy is going to be expensive. It's not going to happen if we decide income growth is toxic.

> The problem is that most jobs have had stagnant wages for decades and developers are an exception.

Only if you think "most jobs" really means "Most jobs required unskilled labor in developed nations". China and the rest of Southeast Asia have enjoyed significant wage increase for decades.

Developers are an exception to your "most jobs" definition because they are not unskilled labor – well, some require less skill, but those have also not enjoyed the same level of wage upside.

The U.S. and all other developing economies (think OECD members) are increasingly "service economies". The high paying jobs are those providing services that require significant skill.

Commoditized jobs have been outsourced to Asia following globalization.

The U.S. inequality debate is entirely myopic because it compares capital and labor upside in the U.S. without taking into account all the upside the rest of the world has enjoyed.

Why should an American (or any other nationality, for that matter) care about what rest of the world has enjoyed? If a system in place is not serving one well, one is going to be upset no matter what happens elsewhere.

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