In Finland, everyone's taxable income is a matter of public record. One theoretical benefit of such a policy is that it eliminates information asymmetries between workers and employers in wage bargaining.
WOW! Never heard of this as an argument. I think it is a very good one for working class.
There is good evidence that when wages are public knowledge minorities and women get paid more too...
Economic prosperity is always most sensitive to what the bottom quarter gets paid, because they are who are obliged to spend what they get immediately.
The greater general prosperity that results benefits everybody else, in sum, more than the increased minimum wage. This was recently demonstrated in Seattle, in practice.
In short: no, you are 100% wrong. You should consider this good news.
100% wrong, and evidently you don't consider it good news.
urban areas all boomed due to the roaring economy up until covid, especially powered by the large growth in the tech sector there and corporate tax cuts (and seattle's low state tax making it an attractive place to be locate). theres no evidence seattle magically helped everyone by raising minimum wages.
likely seattle did fine despite the minimum wage increase, not because of them. Especially since you have to pay that much to attract workers there anyway because of the insane living costs. Which partially ballooned due to artificial price controls like that. and theres no measuring how many people got their jobs automated away or didnt get hired because of the wage increases.
and seattle has also had an explosion of homelessness and violent crime.
However, there isn’t enough research to definitively link pay transparency to pay equality. At U.S. government agencies, most of which are required to publicly release pay information, women make 81% of what men make, according to the 2017 report from the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. In the private sector, where the majority of companies don’t have pay transparency policies, women earn 79% of what their male counterparts make.
>enables transparency between workers and employers in wage bargaining.
Lack of price transparency results to inefficient markets, e.g. someone consistently ending up with outsized profits.
Also, while employees might not be completely fungible (pretty much all are replaceable though on a long enough timeline), the employees are buying money from the employees, and that is fungible.
Arguing about the relevance of information to a transaction for some good is 1:1 with simply arguing about the transaction price for some good. Just haggle directly instead of in some meta fashion.
It is much better now with the internet, but it was not long ago that if you did not know some in a specific business, you had no idea what they would be earning. For a kid in a lower income family, they might never know about what to study to get the top incomes.
> What's the value of a 1999 Camaro? How much should that number influence the price of last year's minivan?
Depends if the buyer is trying to decide between buying a 1999 Camaro or last year’s minivan. Just like a high school student might be trying to decide which field to go into.
Company earnings, turnover and profit, are easily found for all Finnish companies as well. It's pretty easy to weed out the companies on an unhealthy base.
I also saw the salaries as a sign that they're in it for the long term as they could've easily taken home more but they also didn't feel the need to 'save' the company money so they had trust in the current market position and I felt comfortable asking for a 25% raise, which I also got.
It's good to know where you stand among your peers and superiors.
And Fresh Grad from US are demanding 200K from FAANG....
I think it will be hard for countries not currently doing it to have this system in place. But we could at least start with price bracket.
The biggest Win for me isn't the peer checking or market rate. It is that we can also stop HR and Recruiting Agency on their constant lying and BS. Constantly have to play games with them.
Not ~120K USD?
The CEO for example owns a very large home in the most affluent part in the city. the CMO drives a new Tesla and has a villa that's about a 30 minute drive away from our capital city.
A 100k salary is not insane here, there are obviously people making more as well. Those are usually startup founders building something on loaned money or celebrities.
Im living in one of the larger cities, it takes me 10 minutes to drive to the city centrum, so it's a pretty decent location. I pay under 700 euros for 65 square meters with our own sauna. I'm roughly spending 25% of my income on rent for two people.
So, the cost of living is obviously a lot lower here, even if our salaried don't look exactly comparable. You can stretch a 1 million turnover to cover for 10 programmers and tech workers easily instead of getting just one senior developer from the Bay Area :)
That's an interesting approach. I have a couple questions out of curiosity.
Does that include their "offshore" income? By that, I mean income earned outside of the country, not necessarily hidden.
Also, what is income? If there is a billionaire investor and he loses $10 million, do you see that as well?
>Does that include their "offshore" income?
Yes. It counts as taxable income even if you end up paying 0% tax on it (such as via foreign tax credit).
>Also, what is income?
Net realized income. You can't tell the difference between earning $1M, and earning $10M and losing $9M, and earning $10M on paper but only selling $1M.
This whole "loan against debt" story feels off.
Basically, the same thing that their companies used (or maybe still use) for avoiding high tax on repatriation or their non-US earnings.
Edit: Here's a proof but with different incentives (keeping control): https://www.wsj.com/articles/elon-musk-techs-cash-poor-billi...
The easiest way to see this, if you grew up in the U.S. and have not traveled much, is to read tourist guides for your own country.
Generally, people overestimate the variation in their own compatriots and underestimate that in foreigners.
I'm having a hard time matching your generalization with my experience. When I started travelling I was surprised how similar people were regardless of where they were from.
Sure you can dig into political views and find themes but those aren't consistent or pervasive enough to make predictions on an individual basis.
You might as well say "can you identify someone's cultural heritage without discussing anything that would allow you to identify their cultural heritage?". This stipulation makes the task definitionally a matter of chance.
I mean over here you can't look up who makes how much, but the rough value of houses and neighbourhoods, which is used to determine property taxes, is public record.
I'm sure there's some rich people / families living in otherwise underwhelming houses, but they're generally a minority.
The Authoritarian Left that goes on and on about eliminating wealth disparity has no interest in lifting everyone up to be wealthy, not they want to seize the wealth and drag anyone down they deem is "too wealthy"
Which is ironically always someone more wealthy than the person advocating for wealth redistribution, for example Bernie Sanders used to talk about "millionaires and billionaires" until he became a millionaire, now like magic only billionaires are a problem for him
seriously - maybe narcissism isn't the best character trait to structure your society around?
I think that, if you could somehow collect all the wealth and redistribute it equally, within a few years we would see disparity reappear. Some folks are better at accumulating wealth than others.
It seems to me that you would have to keep reallocating wealth. And many would then ask, what's the motive for generating wealth if it's just going to be taken away from you?
The same motivation that drives some folks to study e.g. philosophy, even though it's perfectly well known that this will never make you rich: Because they like it.
You don't just e.g. found a company for the sake of money - you also do it because it allows you to do things on your own terms, it gives you prestige, it gives you the satisfaction of being 'successful'. In todays day and age, this is usually equivalent with 'generating wealth', but I'm a firm believer that this does not necessarily have to be the case.
For one thing, people won't have money to invest in new ventures.
You don't do it for the paycheck, you do it because you like it. Why education, social work, and other human services fields, but not business? That is odd to me.
It’s not actually that fascinating, and has a simple explanation: the people saying this about teachers are not the same people that are commenting here. It’s a non-sequitur.
The notion that educators (or anyone else for that matter) ought to accept bad pay or working conditions because of “passion” is completely objectionable. Teachers should be well-compensated for the important and difficult work they do.
Is it ethical to force people to give up against their will money that they (presumably) earned "fair and square"?
Assuming we find that ethical formula (which seems dubious to me but let it ride for the sake of discussion) the next question is, would the people willing to work under that system be "enough"? And then we have to ask "enough for what purpose?"
That gets into ethical and speculative issues that cut right to the heart of the human condition. Wendell Berry asked, "What are people for?" Bucky Fuller calculated that we could bring about a secular utopia for ~$25 billion by sometime in the 1970's if we applied our technology efficiently to supplying our physical needs. I'm open to the idea that we don't need open-ended profit motive to create a good and worthwhile global society (in fact even Adam Smith thought the capitalist "greed is good" phase would be just that: a temporary phase between the old system and the new.)
After the end of WW2, the Allies decided to repudiate the ReichsMark (the German dollar) and issue a new Mark. Everyone who held ReichsMarks saw it go to zero. To get the economy going again, everyone was issued 50 of the new Deutsch Marks.
Within a couple weeks, the people who had been wealthy before were rapidly moving ahead, and the ones who had not been were again at the bottom.
I.e. the people who knew how to make money still knew how to make money, and the people who didn't still didn't.
I feel like it's probably a bad idea to let individuals acquire so much wealth and power that they rival some nations, yet I haven't been able to frame an ethical way to prevent it if the "0.001%" have acquired their wealth legitimately, that is, by the rules we all must follow.
People storing money under their mattress presumably were in trouble, but doing that already puts you at risk of devaluation through inflation. And I'd imagine that most wealthy people are wealthy because they do exactly the opposite and hold assets instead of currency.
The people that told me this story were in Berlin at the time.
There are more than you think. Pretty much every city has a nice neighborhood where the wealthy residents live. The difference between someone worth $10mm vs someone worth $100mm is not visible from the street.
You can only get their fluid money which is probably quite similar in a time sensitive situation like that.
Which means that a shocking number of millionaires live in poor neighborhoods and have modest lifestyles.
Those aren't the super-wealthy, of course. But most wealthy people can't be identified by where they live.
And given that the people who attained that status on average lived in cheap neighborhoods, the fact that their income wouldn't stretch long in an affluent neighborhood isn't really a concern for them.
That translates to ~$1.7M - 2.7M, or an income of ~68k to 108k which is still not that significant.
According to the statistics that they gave, an estimated 3.5 million Americans were that wealthy. In 1996 the US population was around 270 million so we're talking about the top 1.3% of Americans by net worth.
For more about what this group looked like, read https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/style/longterm/books/c....
This is particularly true for intergenerational wealth. I grew up in a area with fair number of affluent households. You couldn't realize it until you became familiar the community.
Denmark is known for "leaving babies in strollers outside of cafes". The Nordic social-liberal countries (Finland included) solve this problem not by opacity but by having social support and trust.
Or a target for scamming.
Seems privacy nightmare too. I hope there is an opt out where you don't ask and yours is private.
For one, the wealthy don't tend to have any serious income - it's mostly capital gains for one of their holding companies or similar.
Second, those numbers can be seriously "massaged" by having debt - your income will show much lower if you have any significant debt (no mater how low the interest rate is).
For normal / regular people, the public figure gives you a very rough estimate.
Again - the rich and wealthy will almost always show up with income 0, tax 0, assets 0. You don't even need to be filthy rich to get it structured like that.
edit: What it did create, though, was a cottage industry of tax snoopers. Over here, you can see who's been checking you out - and nosy people not wanting to do that, will pay a couple of bucks for some service where others will check out your information.
To be fair the lines get blurry because tax codes like to tax individuals differently to business entities. E.g individuals get taxed on mostly gross profit (income) whereas companies get taxed on net profit after expenses.
IMHO the whole thing would probably be filled with less gaps if we just relied on one of the two or unified them.
That said, I'm not sure it would work in the US, where individualism has been taken to such extreme lengths - I could imagine it being used as bragging rights, rather than a source of moral embarrassment as it would be in Europe and Scandinavia.
This might be unfathomable to some people and I must admit that having all salaries public is a bit strange to me as well. I don't know if I like it. I also read elsewhere on here that it only reports net income. I wonder how many schemes of making it look like you have less net income than you really do are employed. Sort of like profitable companies making themselvesook like they are loosing money or barely scraping by to avoid taxes.
In Scandinavia, the approach to other person earning couple of times more than you could be summarized by "good for you".
Then real wealth started moving in to buy property as investments. Now we have people who have gates and armed guards. They have private police to scare the locals. They harass school board members for access to school vouchers for the private schools they are starting so their kids don't have to attend the public schools.
It's different around here now. It's a lot less 'community' and all it took was about a half dozen really wealthy folks to upset the apple cart.
Nobody jokes about money anymore in any context, and people seem to be a lot less happy than they used to be just in general.
If you're living in a trailer park because that's all you can afford, if you treble your income there's a good chance you'd move out right away.
On the other hand, if you own two $150,000 Lamborghinis and a guy moves in next door with only a single $100,000 Ferrari, are you going to be moving out because the neighbourhood is going down hill? Probably not.
This happens with any disparity - education, income, wealth. Differences in these cause some people to act differently. I've met many people who think earning $100,000 a year qualifies you as "rich", and there are a lot of people who think they won't have anything in common with someone who is educated beyond undergrad.
I imagine it would suddenly be a metric on Zillow and Realtor - "average neighborhood income". People would self-select based on that, making neighborhoods less financially diverse. No one would want to be seen as the broke person in the neighborhood, and no one would want to way over-buy the neighborhood. Maybe you would, but people would "know" whether you could afford to live there or whether you were taking a house from someone else when you could afford to live in a nicer place. Either way, it would not be comfortable, not to mention if you lived somewhere for a while and your career took off - you'd then maybe out earn the neighborhood and be forced to move, rather than be able to remain and blend in.
On my earlier comment, I guess 1/4 wasn't the right ratio. My point was more that someone making 200k may not move into a neighborhood where the average income is 50k, when they otherwise would have, because they would be viewed very differently among neighbors and it would be hard to blend in. This would lessen tax revenue for low-income areas as people would be less willing to move in.
In general, talking about salary in the States is taboo, but not among hourly workers. If you hear a conversation about work between hourly workers, it generally comes out pretty quickly what they are making. I read an article stating it happens for price discovery - they mention it regularly so they can charge the right rates and work at the highest paying location.
Also not saying that diversity in this case is a good thing or a bad thing - just that it exists and it may have interesting consequences or change with this policy. I would think making salaries public might limit gentrification. But it might also cause flight and impact the tax base. I do not think neighborhoods need to be uniformly financially diverse...
If it were opt-in that would be fine, otherwise it's an invasion of privacy of most people who aren't rich.
It's almost as bad as having medical conditions and STIs test results listed publicly.
Facilitating public exposure of counting other people's money doesn't help anyone except the rich to know if you can fight them in court or how much to bribe them.
Fight wealth inequality with income-&-holdings-proportional fines; simple, government-calculated graduated taxes without complicated exemptions; elimination of corporate/wealth welfare; and expand economic-advancement-oriented welfare to those who aren't super-rich who can use it.
If it were opt-in it would be pointless. Surely that's obvious?
> Facilitating public exposure of counting other people's money doesn't help anyone except the rich to know if you can fight them in court or how much to bribe them.
This is a fair point, but I think these are relatively small individual downsides, which are also much more visible (and potentially addressable). Bribery is probably a harder nut to crack, but the legal system favouring the rich (& lawyered up) is something that one can potentially work toward balancing/mitigating with legislative measures.
By the government? What business is it of the government to even know who my sexual partner(s) is/are (especially for a negative test result)?
> All 50 states require both physicians and laboratories to report to local or state health departments the names of persons newly diagnosed with Centers for Disease Control-defined AIDS [1]. However, because AIDS cases represent onset of the disease caused by HIV, HIV data is necessary to monitor the epidemic.
https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/hiv-and-health-...
/s
To your points:
> gold-diggers
I'm not sure if this is an idiomatic term and out of my grasp, but if you mean that people will get romantically involved with others because of their money... this is a non-issue. Happy to debate it further, but it seems so silly and self-apparent that we shouldn't care at all about it
> Invasion of privacy
Arguably, but as long as only a minimum amount of whats is public, with only the lump-sums published, I think its fine in context.
> It's almost as bad as having medical conditions and STIs test results listed publicly.
I think these are very different things, the difference is not just of severity. They are different classes of things. Financial information relates to money, which only makes sense in a society (money is for trade). A disease's effects are personal. When they aren't, you are obligated to disclose them and/or to comply to other rules (for example, to quarantine).
> Facilitating public exposure of counting other people's money doesn't help anyone except the rich to know if you can fight them in court or how much to bribe them.
I think the experience where this has been applied is precisely the opposite - the rich are the ones affected the most. And - if your justice can be bought, the problem has less to do with the knowledge that the other can't find back and more to do with the legal system in the first place.
> Fight wealth inequality with income-&-holdings-proportional fines; simple, government-calculated graduated taxes without complicated exemptions; elimination of corporate/wealth welfare; and expand economic-advancement-oriented welfare to those who aren't super-rich who can use it.
Can't argue with that, even if I wanted to, in fewer than 15 pages. Complex stuff!
Who are you to have the gall to claim conclusive knowledge of an unknowable without a shred of evidence? How do you think gold-diggers and con-artists work, hang-around at airports, golf-courses, and investment brokerages waiting for rappers with the most gold chains?
> I think its fine in context.
That's your opinion that you're deciding for other people. It's the only number that matters and yet you're stilling trying hard to trivialize it.
> And - if your justice can be bought,
Nope, you automatically lept entirely in the wrong direction: it's not the justice who can be bought that is the problem, but the rich knowing how to calculate exactly how to exploit and buy-off the poor. Think Indecent Proposal or Bhopal rather than some Western movie about a crooked town sheriff.
Whoa, relax. ISTM GP is probably a typical human. "Gold-diggers" are not and have never been a major threat to reasonably well-adjusted people. For weirdos who temporarily possess more money than they deserve, perhaps "gold-diggers" are a spice of life. Fools and wealth are soon parted, but that's true no matter what gets published.
>Nope, you automatically lept entirely in the wrong direction: it's not the justice who can be bought that is the problem, but the rich knowing how to calculate exactly how to exploit and buy-off the poor. Think Indecent Proposal or Bhopal rather than some Western movie about a crooked town sheriff.
I absolutely think that the core issue is that the legal system can 'be bought', i.e., it can bankrupt people even if they are right. Reforming that shouldn't be completely impossible and would by definition solve the niche problem you are describing. Btw, as a rule _any_ corporation can sue _any_ non-famously rich person and be sure that they threat of litigation costs will weight in their favor. Disclosed tax info worsens nothing from the current status quo.
> That's your opinion that you're deciding for other people.
It is opinion, yes. But all laws are someone's opinion 'deciding for other people'. And I mean absolutely all laws, even the most basic ones like the right to live or to have private property. It's all social constructs, and we decide which ones stand
> Who are you to have the gall to claim conclusive knowledge of an unknowable without a shred of evidence? How do you think gold-diggers and con-artists work, hang-around at airports, golf-courses, and investment brokerages waiting for rappers with the most gold chains?
I must say I'm surprised this issue seems important to you (and again - completely irrelevant to me). I absolutely don't care about something that I've only ever heard about in soap operas and have never, ever, heard of an example that bothered me in real life. I'm curious what makes this a relevant issue in your view, but I understand if its personal and you don't want to explain. But if you don't have any personal biases, let me argue that the problem of gold diggers is primarily a problem for the gold-dug (?). If a rich person doesn't want to marry/have a relationship with a person that only likes them for their money... then don't. I don't care, and I think nobody should
I think the claim is that you don't know whether a person is only interested in you for your money, and that this colors every social interaction you have, romantic or otherwise, with a undertone of worrying that any generosity you display is being exploited by someone who will abandon you the moment the money runs out. Cf fair-weather friends, miserliness, etc.
Others have spoken to your other points, but as for this, yeah, exactly.
We're talking about how we'd organize society (or some aspect of it), the basis of which involves making decisions for other people, in the sense of developing rules that hopefully people will abide by as participants in the society even if they disagree.
and this is largely the primary difference between American Culture /Politics and the rest of the world, specifically European nations
European nations have always been more collectivist in nature, where the US was founded on Individualism, and Individual Freedom.
There are signs that the US is losing this desire, and it saddens me because unlike you I do value personal freedom above all else, and I think the world needs a nation that continues to put personal freedom above everything else.
The Ultra Rich do not use Personal freedom to disable efforts, it uses Government Regulation to disable efforts, the Rich LOVE big government why do you think many billionaires vote Democrat, it enables them to control the economy to ensure the poor are kept poor and dependent on government. In the end we should look to Smash the State, Eat the Rich, and expand personal freedom [2]
And you think that the US does that?
Exercising personal freedom necessitates having the material and mental resources to buy stuff, to be able to move from place to place, to change jobs, etc. It seems to me that a plausible proxy measure for personal freedom is social mobility, the likelihood that you will be better off than your parents. As far as I remember the country with highest social mobility is Denmark.
As a personal anecdote, I am many times better of income and wealth wise than my parents even though we have the same education level and seemingly the same income opportunities, yet I have made better choices with my finances (learning from their [bad] example). My sibling is the same. One of my parents has zero retirement savings and will live off SocSec (likely with the assistance of me and my sibling). My other parent has slightly more savings but not by much and has lots of debt, both are within 5 years of SocSec retirement Age
Slightly off topic - I'd wager the overwhelming majority of the HN posters are signficantly better-off than their parents, solely by virtue of being tech-workers. We tend to forget, but at no point in capitalism's history has such a numerous caste of white-collar knowledge workers been so well compensated as we are now
In your case it may well be mostly because of better financial decisions (especially if you are orders of magnitude better off, which is hard to do without consistent investment in any case), but for most of us this is also true just by 'placement luck'
If you have any good (and brief!) resources on this please post them; I'd like to glance at how deep this discusson goes