Consider: You are worth about $10mil, in terms of labor. If you work for 40yrs, from 20 to 60, then you are worth about $250k/yr.
Conclusion: We are underpaying nearly everybody in society.
Conclusion: We are underpaying nearly everybody in society.
If you’re interested US GDP is $22tn, with a work force of 164m people. That gives an economic product of about $134k per person per year on average. That includes unemployed people though, because it’s the labour force size not the number of people in employment.
- All corporate profit is theft! - Profit not theft because money is our primary means of compensating people for shouldering risk, etc etc etc.
I would nonetheless appreciate a pay raise.
Also, I have been salaried several times in my life, and in each case, I was expected to do various things outside of a 9-5 "workday" sort of framework. Without being too self-oriented, I think that I earned the salary commanded. I've never been compensated even $200k/yr, and my highest is about $150k/yr. Even those of us that are well-paid and well-respected for our work are not paid enough to justify the time that we lose to work.
These are all just estimates.
But if your life is worth x per year, and you x * z number of waking hours, and you trade some of those waking hours for cash ...
Where am I wrong?
Edit: I’m not even sure why we are pruning non working years from the calculation.
In other words, society doesn't care what you're doing when you aren't working, as long as you're leaving society alone. Thus society has no real reason to pay you just for existing. We might demand that our society put money in everybody's pocket, as a way of creating a capitalism which respects humanity, but it is not strictly necessary, because money is not strictly necessary for a society to exist.
So the total value of your life, to you, should necessarily include all the money you can earn plus all the things you do that you value more than working.
Etc.
Edit: I’m not disputing that other systems, including non money based systems are possible, it just seems way outside of the scope of the original contention.