In Norway, personal income is a matter of public record
articles.sfgate.com
articles.sfgate.com
The government could also compulsorily publish photos of everybody's genitals every year. Again, you'd probably get used to it, and it probably wouldn't be as bad as it sounds, but I can't see any upside to it.
It means that anyone who's interviewing for a job at a company can look up what everyone else at the company makes, so they don't have to waste time interviewing with companies that pay too little, and it gives them better negotiating leverage.
In general, it pushes the labor market toward being an ideal liberal market. Marx thought that would result in the wages of labor falling to just above its cost of production, i.e. just enough to feed and clothe you. It looks like he was wrong.
This in itself doesn't contradict Marx's point (and what Marx thought the real value of things was is irrelevant). The point where he got it wrong was apparently in equating the cost of keeping a laborer alive with the cost of their labor.
To elaborate, if you're not familiar with these ideas of supply and demand curves, the idea is that as you produce more and more of something, the cost to produce it eventually starts to go up forever.
For example, working 20 hours a week might have a negative cost, working 40 hours a week means you don't have a lot of socializing time, working 80 hours a week means you have no leisure time unless you have someone else to cook and clean for you, working 100 hours a week means you're sleep-deprived and have time for neither leisure nor cooking and cleaning, working 168 hours a week is invariably fatal within a few months, and working more than that is impossible.
On the other side, the incremental value to the consumer diminishes after some point, ultimately reaching zero. A single fork per person is useful every day, six forks per person is useful only when they invite friends over or want to postpone doing the dishes, thirty forks per person is useful only if you're doing funky art projects by bending forks, and 300 forks per person would be valuable only as scrap metal, i.e. the labor that went into making them produced zero or even negative value.
The theory is that these two curves must intersect in at least one point, and that's the market equilibrium. It's commonly assumed that they intersect in only one point because they're monotonic, but that's probably not true.
If the former is less than the latter, obviously there is no sale. If the latter is less than the former, then the price will be somewhere in between these points - exactly where is the interesting thing.
It also means you can see how much your co-workers are making. This can create resentment if two people doing the same job with the same experience make different amounts of money.
It will be interesting to see if Norway's new law causes workers to value their labor more highly.
Edit: apparently this is old news! I wonder what effect is has had...
Try cutting wages on middle/lower tier workers if they know exactly how much upper mgmt makes. Tough to look a man in the eye while trying to extract some value out for yourself.
How? The wealth of the richest is already extensively canvassed in the media.
When tax time came around I received papers from the government with a completely filled out tax form based upon all of my public information. If everything was OK I would sms a code back to them and my taxes were done.
Look at the quotes : "Actress and director Liv Ullmann, for instance, earned $17k ... Pioneering women's long-distance runner Grete Waitz, a nine-time New York City Marathon champion, earned $13k"
Either their best and brightest are dirt poor or they prefer earning and keeping their money abroad.
If that was the objective of the law, it's a success.
I would assume that both Ullmann and Waitz earned most of their income outside of Norway.
Of course, the problem is that the information was made available, not that parents don't teach their kids not to tease ...
Thanks for your help.