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Comment by eyeundersand | Hacker News Reader

> We should stop trying to pay for good work, and instead, try to hire people who like doing good work and damn the pay. This is in line with the traditional folk wisdom of Cambridge: “hire good people and let them get on with it”.

> Lastly, to make the economists less greedy, they should be paid less.

Ha, I needed a good chuckle in the morning. I'll be damned if I accept a job where they except high-quality work for pennies. From my conversations, my colleagues share this sentiment. Also, comparing a (severely underpaid for the work they do) post-doc's salary to global income and saying they're doing fine is a bit disingenuous. -phd candidate in applied econ.

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There are an unfortunate amount of people out there who think everyone else should do their jobs out of love of the work and not worry about pay. I've found they rarely hold themselves to this standard, though, and try to find excuses for why it shouldn't apply to them. You hear people who aren't teachers say this about teachers quite often, especially when they're complaining about the yearly education budget.

Many humanities faculty will complain that they're paid lower salaries than faculty in other areas, yet they'll say students should major in their (low paying and hard to find a job) fields because education is not about money.

Article author here. I do indeed work in an economics department. I admit that my sentiment was a bit tongue-in-cheek, because the chance of the discipline supporting this idea seems... low. But I do worry about the effect of very high salaries for "big shots", and I take seriously the risk that we attract people with the wrong mindset.

> to make economists less greedy they should be paid less

How about we tax billionaires, and pay our academics real wages?

I was an academic once, and I made near minimum wage. It's insane to set up a reward structure that punishes thinking people and rewards the randomness of birth.

I'm very much in favor of taxing inheritance at much higher levels, but I think there is a debate to be had whether the marginal dollar is best spent on social science research or academia writ large.

I've seen those arguments against free college (what if people get a useless degree in literature!). I think it's bogus.

I want to live in a society of thoughtful intelligent people. I pretty much don't care what you study. I don't care if it has immediate industrial impact like STEM. Higher education is tied to all sorts of benefits, including lower crime rate, better health outcomes...

I think if someone wants to attend college, and they've got the aptitude, then I want that person to do it. I don't want them prevented from learning because of cost.

Looking over the list of top billionaires, well under half appear to have been passive beneficiaries of birth randomness.

Is this supposed to be reassuring?

From a societal standpoint, we should design a system that rewards the behavior we want to see. No one has given me any evidence that "being born to someone rich" is actually the thing we want to reward in our tax code.

It’s not clear that the tax code is rewarding that in a significant way. You might argue it’s failing to punish it enough for your taste, which is a fine discussion to have.

When I look over the top 10 here, 9/10 are on that list from being overwhelmingly self-made and I want what 8 of those have created to exist. (I think lots of other people self-evidently want LVMH to exist, even though I don’t care either way. Same with L’Oreal though that’s also the one that’s not self-made.)

https://www.forbes.com/real-time-billionaires/

So when deciding on the policies of a nation of 350 million people, you look at the top 10?

That's a completely arbitrary cut off. Why not look at the top 1, and then tell me that I should extrapolate that out to say that every billionaire is bald and owns Amazon.com ?

Surely you see how choosing top 10 is a completely arbitrary cut off that you invented.

Ok. Pick a different N and do the analysis to see if it differs materially in a way that supports that birth lottery matters more than within-life activity.

This has a LOT to do with the fact that inherited wealth is distributed amongst a number of heirs and held in trusts that they aren't the full beneficiaries of.

The argument that the top few have self-generated wealth doesn't in any way impinge upon the larger trend of wealth being concentrated amongst a smaller cohort over time.

Of course inheritance is not meant as an incentive for people to choose to be born to someone rich; that is not something one can choose.

When asking whose behavior something incentivizes, the answer must always be among those who can influence it.

The possibility of inheritance is an incentive to have money when one dies, that it might be passed on to one's heirs, whose wealth one often values, by virtue of valuing their general well being (as money can be exchanged for goods and services).

It is not the not-yet-conceived who advocate against there being large inheritance taxes.

Aren't prosperity and wealth things we want to see? We shouldn't tax wealth at all, that is what we want, a wealthy society.

Yeah this reads like some nonsense wankery, and subscribed to nonsense ideas like “Great Men of History”, eg in the part about preferring the output of sexual harassers over the output of many more less problematic researchers.

There’s a reason the saying is “Science progresses one death at a time”, and not “Science progresses by being sexual-harassment apologists”

The moment any economic argument is made that relies on human altruism is the moment it should be rejected. Some people may act altruistic some of the time, but in aggregate people refuse to be scammed to help the “greater good”.

Are you sure? You know about public goods experiments with punishment, right?

Curiously, most econ folks seem to miss this. More likely: they conveniently ignore it when it suits their ends or when writing opinionated pieces after they've "made it".

Huh? Can you point to examples? I can think of a few, but I am unaware of any field or approach that has this tendency less than Economics.

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