If People Were Paid by Ability, Inequality Would Plummet
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
That is almost certainly correlated to specific "ability" in the task they are getting paid to do on average although you could argue to what extent.
The subtext here is "things would be more fair if you let me be dictator and pay everyone based on my subjective perception of their ability which is more fair than the collective decisions of a free society."
Because the article includes education, let's have a smart kid with good education from a poor family: They still won't study abroad in europe; won't take a year to work on their startup; any startup won't be financed by friends, family and fools; won't be introduced to the CEO of some company by his uncle; won't be meeting people on the golf course; they probably even studied longer and are missing relevant job experience because they had to finance it themselves.
If they are smart they can make it further up, but the inhibitors add up and they won't make it all the way.
Yes, but they can make it some part of the way up, putting their kids in position to go a little higher, and so on. Success is largely social, a multi-generational task, which is why parents push their kids so hard: college, and then elite college, is the main step that breaks the cycle. Maybe gen 1 goes to Stanford and joins a FAANG. It's gen 2 who will have the CEO uncle and a shot at founding a FAANG.
Hence the momentum to address the monstrous differences in opportunity that have been created after many, many generations of treating particular groups of Americans as second-class if not outright sub-human.
And it seems weird to want to pay back a debt racked up by an ancestor. Or not even an ancestor, just an ancestor of someone who looks like your ancestors. Anyway, I don't think you help oppressed people like that, I think you help them by going in there and teaching and being positive about the real opportunities available - to go to college, get a job, earn a living. Live in a bougie neighborhood, maybe.
A simple and straight forward solution is that every job is required to have a union available by law, we remove most of our inequality to the point where fighting about who has multi-generational privilege is no longer an issue. One step further is worker ownership of the company they work for. Example, instead of being publicly traded, Facebook should be owned by the people that work there, 1 share per employee. It would result in a much healthier environment and less psychopathic corporate behavior.
For example, consider the case of Simmons, where a company good at creating value was bought by private equity people who were very skilled at extracting cash: https://www.nytimes.com/2009/10/05/business/economy/05simmon...
I see that some people have a "might makes right" view of this. But I think we over-reward cash extraction, and so under-reward value creation. If we shifted that, we'd get more value creation, and a fair bit less misery.
> Most low-wage workers are underpaid relative to their measured intelligence and personality traits, and many of the highest-paid professionals — including doctors, lawyers and financial managers — are overpaid according to the same metrics.
This is a ridiculous comparison because low wage workers are not being paid for their intelligence. Why would anybody ever think that skill at 2 different jobs should be measured by the same criteria?
Should Michael Jordan have been paid equally as high as a baseball player as he was when he was on the Bulls? Same person, same intelligence, same measurable traits.
It's kind of weird to see "ability" as some monolithic trait that people should get paid for. Ability to do what? Maybe you have a great ability to spin plates on your nose. If nobody wants you do that, you're not going to get paid for it.
CEOs argue that their wages are the result of a similar tournament. The example of WeWork suggests that it may in some cases just be a better position for looting money from the investors and staff.
As Shockley and innumerable analyses have shown, 'ability' defined very narrowly may be normally distributed, but because tasks draw on many abilities and steps can multiply rather than add ('there is nothing so useless as doing well that which should not be done at all'), it's very easy for a bunch of normally-distributed abilities to yield a log-normal distribution of outputs, in which case there is massive inequality in final results: https://www.gwern.net/docs/iq/1957-shockley.pdf
1) I've seen too many well-educated co-workers who wont work 2) I've seen too many people with high IQs who can't lead 3) I wish I could report an HR violation for the inclusion of "age" on this list 4) The use of personality traits seemed like an interesting start but left me wanting
For me: it was a swing and a miss
“If people were paid by their height, inequality would plummet.”
Hmm...
Paying by ability might lead to increased inequality, and put some workers in holes from which they would never recover.
You might be a strong, mighty genius, but if your ass is "chilling" on the couch 24/7, your exact worth is 0(ZERO)$
I don't think the aim of the author is to minimize the impact of the later, but to bring attention to how local/regional business policy and the growth of this sector, can have a real adverse impact on income inequality.
I like that he also balances some (not all) concerns between the two poles of US politics: >Beyond a commitment to equality, possible remedies include expanding access to high-quality public services like early-childhood education and community health services for needy families. But the evidence also suggests the need for expanding access to markets and defending their integrity. Both the right and left right would have to make compromises; it would seem to be a fair trade, with big gains for all.
Absolutely nothing to do with Docker.
Edit: is docker holding such a strong monopoly over the word container? Dangerous precedent.
A man digging a hole in the desert that no one wants, regardless of how much "ability" or "effort" went into the excavation is inherently selfish, but almost every economic system _besides_ capitalism would see that man rewarded handsomely.
...and I'm not trying to be glib about inequality, which I think is the most serious problem of our time. I'm just suspicious that anything we used to try and replace capitalism with would result in a lot of "holes in the desert". Read about the surplus of baby shoes in the Soviet Union...
There is something I think of as the "paradox of capitalism" that describes how capitalism is _simultaneously_ the best system for determining prices and the worst form of government.
Why would a company pay a CEO millions if they have no talent? If that were the case, they would just find a random person and pay them minimum wage.
This sounds like the reasoning of a worker that thinks managers don't actually do anything all day, when the reality is much different.
Paying by ability is foolish. I know many people that have the ability to get a good job, but choose to smoke copious amounts of weed and instead sit on the couch all day. It would be like valuing companies based on the idea only.
Over the same period, ordinary worker compensation has risen 12%. Is your theory that CEOs have gotten 940% better in the last 40 years?
I'd say no, not really. (Indeed, I think there's reasonable evidence they've gotten worse.) They've just gotten better at extracting cash. And if you're wondering why companies would pay way more, you should think about the fact that "companies" don't set CEO salaries. Company boards do. And who's on boards? CEOs and other high fliers. ., I also think there's a positive feedback loop here. One part is on the payment side. When companies are looking for a new CEO, it's like somebody shopping for a rare and important purchase, like a new car or like surgery. If they get it right, everybody's happy; if not, it could be a disaster. So there's a strong incentive to pay an above-average amount, in hopes of getting an above-average outcome.
The other part is on the company structure side. An expensive CEO is expected to Do Things, to be dramatically in charge. That means creating company structures and a company culture that are very CEO-focused. Then the next time the board hires a CEO, they have an even stronger need for someone who is extraordinary. So the next CEO gets an even bigger slice of money that previously would have gone to investors and the people who do the actual work.
As an alternative, consider that a lot of tech's biggest moneymakers are run differently. Instead of concentrating power at the top, power is more distributed. The average worker is not seen as a replaceable cog, but valuable talent. CEOs are not turning over every few years, but stay around for decades. And consequently, the pay inequality is lower.