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Comment by rkk3 | Hacker News Reader

> I think my favorite would be this one [3], where they assert that a $150,000 salary in San Francisco is excessive.

When it's almost 19,000 public employee's being paid over $150,000 in SF, that kind of does sound excessive especially in the context of a budget deficit.

> These public workers are in charge of essential duties. Suggesting that a firefighter or a teacher are "overpaid", is ridiculous and sets a dangerous precedent.

It-least in [3] they never use the word Teacher. They do claim the average Firefighter Comp is 191,000 in SF. Maybe it's not 191K but isn't there some number where people in charge essential duties can be "overpaid" ?

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> that kind of does sound excessive

I don't know about you, but I'd have to compare it to cost of living references and public employee's per capita to begin to have an understanding. Even if I had that, there are many other factors I'd want to explore: what's the impact of CoL and commuting? What's the impact of employees not living in the jurisdictional area? What are the structural systems which function to determine salaries, both as an interaction with labor markets and those that have been institutionalized? If I was hired as a consultant to make judgements on SF public spending, in short, I'd do my due diligence.

Is this the bureaucracy defense? I need to be certified, have 30 years experience, and do a 10,000 page analysis before I can have a "legitimate" opinion.

No, but you presented a false dichotomy.

They are saying my process isn't "rigorous" enough and needs to follow their complicated rules and ways of doing things, I don't think calling that bureaucratic is a false dichotomy.

No, they're saying you're making purely gut judgements that are rash.

For any employer, private or public, slashing salaries and benefits is a great way to start trending towards 100% turnover, which is a pretty negative outcome if you want to maintain any semblance of operation.

All I said is that it might be excessive to pay 40% of public employee's individually [1] 40k more a year than the median household income [2] in the area.

Don't equate that with arguing for Austerity.

https://www.openthebooks.com/forbes-why-san-francisco-is-in-... [1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/sanfranciscocitycalifornia [2]

Are you not arguing that public sector employees in San Francisco should get a pay cut?

Not really, all I did was question the OP scoffing that an 150k salary is not a lot of money. My mother is a public school teacher.

It's not a lot of money in San Francisco, where you're fighting with every tech company employee for housing

Do you have a quantitive way of making the distinction of what "a lot" is? 150k is substantially more than the average SF household, and is about 83 percentile for individuals.

https://dqydj.com/income-by-city/

Average home prices in SF is 1.3M, so a household of two teachers would give them a P/E ratio of 5. The P/E ratio for the average US home is 4.4.

Are teachers overpaid, or are people in SF underpaid relative to the value of a house?

a P/E ratio of 4.4 is nuts. The fact that we normalized that is wild. Same for committing 30% of net income to housing.

That's right. I enjoy phrasing social problems in the language of software engineering so I'll do that here. The structures which enable these salaries are a Chesteron's Fence[1]. Shooting from the hip ignores second-order effects[2] and is a thought terminating rhetorical pattern. It's the equivalent of trying random code to fix a bug without doing root-cause analysis. If I tried to do any of these on a development team I'd expect someone to take me aside and kindly explain the consequences. For some reason (which I'd be happy to understand) all of these valuable mental tools are left on the bench when we move out of development and into other realms. They are powerful techniques to understand systems of all types -- we should aspire to use them whenever we can.

1. https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

2. https://personalmba.com/second-order-effects/

Agreed that it is important to understand things on a systems level, but at what point are we not talking about Chesterton's Fence but The Divine Right of Kings/Mandate of Heaven.

This feels risky, like a reply to a rhetorical question. For me the difference between the two is the acknowledgement of human authorship. Chesterton's Fence assumes human authorship leaving open the possibility for change, while the The Divine Right of Kings/Mandate of Heaven explicitly buries its authorship in an attempt to crystalize it as immutable. Feel free to disagree, but it feels like we're drifting away from the plot.

My thought is that your claim that setting salaries is a complicated process and we shouldn't rashly come to judgement, while not untrue, is also in effect saying "ours is not to wonder why" and that because high salaries exists therefore they are legitimate a la Divine Right of Kings.

Is it not enough to just say that we should pay people market rates? If the true cost of a firefighter in California is indeed 190k then thats what they should be paid. If its lower then they are overpaid and if its higher than they are underpaid.

This is not to say that firefighters are not essential workers, of course they are. We can make an argument that every firefighter should be paid 500k or 1 million. Heck, they save lives, so why not 10 million?

Ultimately, the vast majority of people not in public sector work doesn't get to make these kinds of arguments, and are simply forced to take market rates.

Kind of? Do you think the market for firefighters is a monopsony and if so, how does that shape the firefighter labor market?

Maybe so, but this is always going to be a problem with unionized government work. We can try to approximate a free market by reducing the power of public-sector unions. Ultimately it has to come down to tax payers to hold government accountable. More transparency is a step in that direction.

These markets are monopsonies. The market rate is much lower than the actual value these jobs are worth. Even so, we do not have enough firefighters and teachers. This is a price signal that the current compensation is insufficient.

Not enough firefighters in that there are open positions and no one is interested? Or open positions only for the already trained/experienced?

If it’s the latter then that’s an argument that compensation is too high if anything. It should be rebalanced such that some of it is used for training.

If the former then that’s just alien to me. Here in Australia firefighting is a prestigious job with a lot of competition. People volunteer to do it for free or do it part time while working another primary job, for years, in the hopes of being able to become a full time firey.

In California, people aren't volunteering enough, they have to resort to prisoners. As far as teachers at least, there are open positions, that require training of course, hence the need for a higher salary.

Do you think a firefighter and a teacher should be able to afford a house in the community they work in?

First I think it's important to differentiate afford to live & afford to buy a home are different things.

Afford to live in the community is significantly more important but In general I think it is better if they can do both. However home's are assets & assets can have bubbles. I don't think the public should necessarily be paying wages such that someone can buy a home at any cost.

Are you in support of radically changing laws around home ownership, potentially to the point of abolishing housing as an investment vehicle? Because you need to either support that, or support people making wages enough to own a home even if that home is radically expensive due to other influences. Anything less is Scrooge levels of sociopathy.

I definitely am in favor of changing laws around making it easier to build & develop new-housing.

I can't afford to purchase these radically inflated assets myself... but if you want to call me scrooge because I don't think owning a multi-million dollar house is a fundamental human right, go ahead.

No one’s saying it’s a fundamental human right, just something a teach should be able to do if he/she teaches in an area that exclusively has multi-million dollar homes.

Like I said previously, Teachers salaries in SF aren't even at question in the cited article. A custodian employed by sf makes an average of 92k [1] vs an average teacher in SF makes 75.6k [2].

But I can still simultaneously believe teachers are underpaid and at the same think they aren't entitled to multi-million dollar homes.

[1] https://www.openthebooks.com/forbes-why-san-francisco-is-in-...

[2] https://www.salary.com/research/salary/benchmark/public-scho...

Does the question substantially change if you replace teacher with custodian? Should custodians be able to afford the community they work in?

If you'll pay me 150k to be a custodian again or however much to afford to purchase a million dollar home I'll take it in a heart beat. You probably haven't but I've actually been a custodian, and besides the pay I found it much a more enjoyable experience than working in tech.

honestly yes. Turning housing into a financial vehicle makes it hard for average people to afford. Housing cant simultaneously be affordable perpetually for average citizens and a investment expected to appreciate in value higher than inflation. trying to have our cake and eat it to has broken the housing market and been the root cause of much suffering and the last big economic rescission.

Does that mean teachers need to get paid $1M/yr in Atherton(94027) where the average home value is $7M?

Proportionally speaking that would put teachers in Todd County South Dakota where the median home value in 2020 was $26,900[1] at an annual salary of $3,842.

If the argument is that teacher salaries should be a linear function of average home values and that a $1M/yr salary doesn't make sense and a $3.8k/yr salary doesn't either, I'm not sure where you want to go from there.

1. https://www.credible.com/blog/data-insights/county-in-every-...

Maybe public workers should have access to public housing too?

If public housing is more attractive than private then property price problem solves itself.

No, I think it would be hilarious if a firefighter working in central London could afford a house there.

It’s not necessarily normal to live in a house. It certainly shouldn’t be normal in cities.

I don't think you can make simple rules like this, or expect complex systems like economies to behave according to such simple rules.

What you can know is that in expensive areas, they will need to pay a premium, but does the premium need to be as high to allow teachers to buy houses there instead of commuting in? And if you did pay them that much, many would prefer to keep the money and commute a bit longer because they may not value housing as much as the people living in the community. So people have different values and we should let them make their own trade offs. If a community can't hire enough teachers because cost of living is high, then they will need to raise wages. Once they can hire enough, then let people chose for themselves where they want to work and live.

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