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Comment by oneiftwo | Hacker News Reader

Not all work is equally valuable. Not all work is equally doable. Some work requires decades patience and sacrifice before one is competent enough to perform it. Some work is physically or cognitively beyond the vast majority of the population.

It doesn't make sense to expect all jobs to have all the same benefits and privelegdes. Even if we pretend that all humans are fundamentally equal in ability, inequality will always exist, so long as humans are free to make choices in a world of finite resources and time.

Moreso, inequality is not intrinsically bad, for it is a great motivator for the kind of innovation that raises the common floor, which is the more important measure.

If you're able to eat, drink, and shelter during a global pandemic, while your entire country is on lockdown, and your economy has crawled to a standstill, then you're in a pretty good place.

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I really can't understand this mindset, it views the system that we have as fundamentally meritocratic and that only hard work matters. This is demonstrably false with a cursory review of how our (the US) education system, economy, and geographic distributions reward and punish people.

Of course we don't have a proper meritocracy or a significant one, and I don't think the OP or anyone advocating it thinks so. Meritocracy is an ideal to strive for and one we'd probably never fully obtain due to the nature of the universe, randomness, and plain out inequality attached to circumstance. What it does mean is that we should aim to reward based on merit in as many places as is feasible and, one could argue, fair.

I.e.: to each according to his value and ability, not purely according to his need. But do so with compassion. I think a fair bit of what goes wrong when this topic and other related ones come up, is that people that advocate for things such as meritocracy are immediately portrayed as heartless and lacking compassion because they advocate for that thing.

> it views the system that we have as fundamentally meritocratic

Agreed. There is another dimension to it as well. Labor pricing is set by "replacement cost."

In a country where workers have been made precarious intentionally [1], replacement cost will be much lower than (a) the surplus value created by the worker, (b) the risk a worker bares in work activities.

There is empirical evidence that this is taking place on a grand scale. [2]

[1] https://chomsky.info/20120508/

[2] https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jofi.12909

Does this imply there aren’t enough employers, so that collusion among employers is feasible?

Feasible and documented [1], but I think that labor monopsony is only part of the issue.

Why are fast food workers signing non-competes, arbitration clauses, and NDA's [2]. The whole balance of power is out of wack.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2014/apr/24/apple-goo...

[2] https://www.natlawreview.com/article/state-attorneys-general...

This idea is false. Intra-generational mobility in the US is quite strong. Half of people in the 1% are not in the 1% a decade later. About 50% of people move up 1 quintile from their starting quintile of income. I don’t have stats on how this compares to EU or other countries, but this shows a majority American people can move between income quantiles in their lifetime.

[1] https://www.stlouisfed.org/publications/inside-the-vault/spr...

This. The US has an abnormally high social mobility, even compared to the EU. You have a better chance of moving to the top 1% here than anywhere else. I'm a Tier 1 FAANG engineer and worked very hard to get here, coming from a middle income family. By first studying hard and building projects to get into a Tier 1 university.

Tier 1 top-talent engineers are just worth multiples more than lower talent people and deserve to reap from their hard work and expertise. It's unfair to me and other FAANGs to say we don't deserve our lifestyle and are silver spoon.

That comment that tier 1 top talent engineers is way too universal, to put it kindly. I've worked 20 years as a dev and leader across two tier 1 companies and succeeded, think Faang. I'm maybe from a tier 3 undergrad. Intelligence, hard work, experience are all things that help me, but maybe also hubris, kindness, focus were important too. I was worth a lot because I worked hard and produced a lot. But I've also met way more productive and intelligent and capable people who were not at those tier 1 companies and not from tier 1 universities. It's like the old saw from my youth, if you think you are so great, a super genius, then probably you were not in a selective enough group (whether that is high school, college, grad school, company, life).

It can be better than EU while still being dismal. Although I'd love to see some stats (not anecdotes) showing that it's better on the whole, because that's certainly not the case for those I know of.

More importantly, measuring it as a single number for the entire country hides a lot of nuance that matters. It's rarely constant across the spectrum, and those at the bottom of it usually see far less social mobility than those higher up. US is pretty good at social mobility for middle class specifically, but really bad for those below that.

Regarding the "silver spoon" bit - why do you take a complaint about inequality to mean that you should be earning less? The way I see it, others should be earning more, and have quality of life closer to mine. And they would, if all that money wasn't collected as economic rent by their employers (in case of small businesses, the chain goes a bit further up, but there's always somebody skimming of wealth generated by other people at the end of it).

It's not as strong as western Europe or Canada so what are you comparing it to? China? Brazil? https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Socioeconomic_mobility_in_th...

Also, moving up a quintile is not that great of a move when you have to be in the top 10% to have a nice life in the US.

On my part I don't consider all inequalities to be fundamentally reducible to a single dimension, so the primary reason I would consider that "inequality is not intrinsically bad" is not so much that it can be "great motivator" [to innovate, if I interpret that as mainly a way to get more money] than that some characteristics are just both plainly dissimilar and impossible to sort, sometimes not even for single individuals considering their taste, even less so for a whole population.

Now it is still interesting to measure a correlation between the income and the ability to work from home and the practical impacts in our current organizations and in specific situations, but this has to be qualified and interpreted very carefully, because I'm not really sure that the conditions for some are specifically worsened in order to be specifically enhanced for others - at least in normal times. Actually, I'm not sure the conditions are even always necessarily enhanced for those who work from home, for example working exclusively from home might be a bad idea for some people; and some companies may have the idea that working from home forever is the new normal, even without pandemic constraints. In that context, that would be one less choice for the workers, compared to a balanced situation. But that has to be completely contextually qualified: it would seem fair to amortize and compensate even otherwise neutral characteristics (not affirming that WFH ability is usually completely neutral) if they become huge disadvantage in specific situations. Because why bother living in a society otherwise?

So it boils down to choice (and I mean root choices: if you have the choice and choose a work occupation that you find extremely fulfilling, but that you can't practice from home, then usually the lack of choice on the work at home subject is only very secondary compared to your original choice of this activity), and in that regard maybe it should be read as a (potential, and very indirect) symptom of real problems rather than a problem on its own: I agree that the ability for individual choices that matter will be greatly improved by e.g. accessible good quality education and health care systems, and the US seems lacking there. The thing is that even if that does not change at all the wage vs. WFH correlation, the overall situation will still be enhanced if that improve the ability for people to chose their job.

> Not all work is equally valuable. Not all work is equally doable. Some work requires decades patience and sacrifice before one is competent enough to perform it. Some work is physically or cognitively beyond the vast majority of the population.

You're right. Designing shirts that work well in both the board room and discoteca is incredibly strenuous work which is why only people who have the correct inter-cranial skull slope (e.g., Wyatt Koch) can do this work.

I mean... it kinda is. Not only is textile design difficult in and of itself (my mom is a very very good hobbyist seamstress, and it takes a lot of work to make even simple garments that work well and feel good), but getting the supply chain running is very difficult and beyond both the skill and patience of most people. You have to be comfortable with not only sewing, but also factory machinery. My mother wanted to make clothes at one point in her life but decided she couldn't scale because she was not comfortable with the large textile die cutting machines that she would have to use to scale.

I dunno who Wyatt Koch is, but if he has designed a shirt and managed to produce it in such volume and with such materials as to be attractive to men (I assume) with money who want to be comfortable, he should be commended. That is very difficult.

Alternatively he could just use a bunch of money inherited from his family and, by merit of having investment capital and a box of crayons, be able to profit off the people he hires.

Have you ever actually had to hire someone to do something nontrivial?

Statistically speaking, hiring good help is difficult. Hiring good help repeatedly is a skill. Building an entire business in an unfamiliar domain is certainly easier with inherited money, but still requires rare talent. Which is why as another poster pointed out, the 1% has a 50% generational turnover.

Income inequality is not intrinsically bad, but we have too much of it in the US. Let's get the ratio of income between the top decile and bottom decile somewhere below 10:1.

At a certain point the ratio is so high that it cannot be explained by differing abilities, and can only be explained by the structure of the market.

Let's say a brain surgeon makes $2m/year. That makes sense, they are uncommonly talented.

Does it make sense that someone can amass as wealth 50,000 years of brain surgeon economic output ($100bn)? If the distribution of human endowments is Gaussian, as it likely is, this level of wealth accumulation cannot be explained by superior productivity alone.

Sure it can, because there's different dimensions of the gaussian distribution. Maybe it takes being in the top 1% on 4 different dimensions to amass over $10bn. Using the population of Earth, that means that on average only 90 such individuals exist who are in the 1% on all 4 dimensions. No one believes that intelligence is the only factor in outsized wealth accumulation.

It's clear to me though that outsized individual wealth is derivative of a myriad of different factors.

> Does it make sense that someone can amass as wealth 50,000 years of brain surgeon economic output ($100bn)? If the distribution of human endowments is Gaussian, as it likely is, this level of wealth accumulation cannot be explained by superior productivity alone.

Well, yeah, if someone figured out how to operate an 10000 brains at once, then all of a sudden one would think that he ought to make 50000 years worth of brain surgeon economic output in five years.

I like your hypothetical, but I'm going to change it a little.

Let's say Amazon records its warehouse workers and captures data which it can use to train industrial robots at some future date.

Those industrial robots have $X of economic value. Who created that value? Did the workers whose data enabled it? Did the DARPA/NSF funded university system who pushed the techniques to the point of being production-ready? Or was all the value created by the Amazon engineer who blended the established modelling techniques and the data?

It's an honest question about the source of value creation and whether inputs are being priced reasonably, efficiently, or fairly.

Following this line of reasoning, one must be worried about who one ought to pay when one makes a wheel out of dirt. I mean that honestly. As a society, we agree the buck ends somewhere for the most part. That which is freely available or observable knowledge typically doesn't mandate compensative.

Public DARPA knowledge is presumably available to every American citizen (or at least it ought to be, since they presumable paid for it). So is employee behavior.

In general, I'm not sure you should be paid for simply having knowledge. You must apply it. Patents represent a recapture of the process for producing knowledge (however poorly one may argue they do it), but those come with an expiration date too.

That is to say, all knowledge eventually loses its price, and some never had any to begin with.

I think you hit the nail on the head.

DARPA and NSF could very easily attach some IP rights to every project that they fund, but they don't. Maybe they should?

Congress could easily pass a law giving workers an ownership interest in recordings of their work "performance". You can't tape a concert and sell the recording without the musician's permission. Why can you do that with other tasks?

As we speak, there are companies tracking the eye movements of radiologists reviewing charts. I for one think the radiologists should get some ownership stake in the resulting architecture.

You're assuming that the returns to talent are linear, when they are not.

Let's say you're hiring a new CEO for Apple; how much is a 0.1% more talented CEO worth? My math says that 0.1% is worth 260 million per year.

Even though the 'best' CEO might only be a tiny bit better than the runner-up, the 'best' runs a much larger company, and makes far more money.

From this, you can see that the returns to the most talented CEOs and executives are more proportional to the scale of the largest enterprises than to the individual's talent.

The cult of CEO is deeply troubling to me.

People thought Apple was going to crater after Jobs, and it was fine. It wasn't fine because it has a hyper-capable supreme leader, it was fine because it employs an army of extremely talented hard working people with a reasonably competent leader.

I assure you that Apple has several Tim Cook quality employees earning orders of magnitude less.

It's just so weird to me that we have one group of people priced at replacement cost, and another priced at who knows what? I think you would say they are priced as a multiple on surplus, but I would disagree.

The problem is loss-aversion. Are you willing to risk losing some small percentage of revenue equivalent to many billions of dollars on the bet that Cook's replacement is as good or better? Tim Cook's salary is almost irrelevant; the important question is whether he is the absolute best person for the job.

As an example: how much value did Steve Jobs add during his second tenure at Apple? Did his compensation package make a significant dent in that?

The market for CEOs is a winner-takes-most deal. Similar to what happens with music artists, the top few albums of the year sell more volume than all the rest.

> The problem is loss-aversion.

Great point.

Increased risk aversion explains both the explosive growth of CEO compensation since 1960 and America's unwillingness to do bold and risky but nevertheless profitable things.

Gone are the days of [1].

[1] https://er.jsc.nasa.gov/seh/ricetalk.htm

> I assure you that Apple has several Tim Cook quality employees earning orders of magnitude less.

Sure, but do you know exactly who they are? Or are we going to take a multibillion dollar bet on someone who's only probably as good as Tim Cook?

The top decile and bottom already are below that ratio. ~90k gets you to the top 10%. 10k puts you at the bottom 10% (not a full time worker). The problem is really the wealth of the top 10%.

See the top households:

Net Worth of the 10%, 1%, and .1% Households Percentile Threshold 10% 2% 1% 0.10% Net Worth $1,182,390.36 $5,816,220.17 $10,374,030.10 $43,090,281.00

The top 1% owns 35% of the wealth in this country. the next 9% own 40%. The bottom 50% own 1.67% of the wealth. That's the problem. Most people are paycheck to paycheck with little opportunity for wealth creation / stability. Most of this is inherited wealth; the wealthy today, across not just the US, but the globe, are largely descended from the wealthy of many generations past. There's a great study on the gravity of wealth from the UK:

https://www.cnbc.com/2013/10/30/whats-in-a-name-wealth-and-s...

Sorry, I phrased that wrong, I'm not talking about the numbers exactly at 10% and 90%. I mean the total of 0-10 and the total of 90-100. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_income_eq...

It's not the people at 90% that are getting way too much money. It's the people above them.

To add to this, forget qualifications and experience. If a job pays well, that in itself is undeniable proof that it has greater value, no justification needed. Capitalism works not because it rewards on someone's definition of merit, but because it rewards doing what people want.

The sad part is that most of the jobs that have great value pay so little. Imagine considering sanitation, seasonal farming, teaching, childcare and other jobs as "low value". Says quite a lot about our values as a society doesn't it?

seasonal farming is not poorly paid: https://money.cnn.com/2012/11/27/news/economy/farming/index....

I think the coronavirus has proven this to be false. Many of the so called "essential jobs" are low paid, but the "essential" label is an acknowledgement of their high value to society.

They are low paid because in most times anyone can and would be willing to do them. Now, no one wants to do them, so pay will increase if the lockdowns continue.

Why is this controversial? It's the truth, however unfair it seems.

This is similar to the price of water. Yes water is essential but it is readily available and so the price is low. Same for many essential jobs. Turns out a lot of the work necessary to keep civilization ticking is menial and requires no specialization. This is not a statement of the value of the workers (though indirectly it unfortunately often is), only the work they they provide.

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