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Comment by mcv | Hacker News Reader

The weird irony of our society seems to be that the most useless jobs pay the most, while the most essential jobs pay the least. A lot of important work is being done by volunteers and charity organisations. The best paying jobs are often parasitic. Like stock manipulation.

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Stock manipulation isn't really a "well paying job" though. The person making money isn't drawing a salary.

The key insight that explains the situation is that we pay based on how easy it is to replace someone. If you are doing a critical job that everyone can do (like cooking) then it is unlikely to pay well. There has been little success by systems that pay people based on how important their job is.

I think that's an important part of it. I'd add another factor: the global economy and financial system is an impossibly complex construct that nobody understands in its totality and which as a result is very difficult to control and predict. Some companies and people manage to find parts of the system where they can essentially tap into a stream of money. Jobs in that area then tend to pay rather more than you would expect from their overall social value (and from the value to the global economy of that stream of money existing), because they're locally valuable in increasing the efficiency of the tapping-of-money process. Conversely, important work that happens not to be easily tied to tapping some stream of money is much less well paid and often under-resourced entirely.

That part sounds like "Don't be perceived as a cost-center," but I think most big-lumbering-org departments have figured out how to plead their case. That's a lot harder to do with something like teaching, where there's a large supply of candidates and everyone agrees the job is socially valuable, but confounding factors make it very hard to measure any individual's contribution.

Is there a large supply of teachers? My impression is that lots of countries have a teacher shortage. And that's partly because society doesn't value teachers as much as it should. Over a century ago, teachers were still considered among the important people of the town (together with the mayor and the local notary), and commanded some respect. These days they're often seen as glorified babysitters despite having manager-level responsibilities.

There is at least a large supply of new, cheap teachers. It's essentially the only adult profession that high-school and college students know (in the US) besides what their parents do, and you can get into it from a starting point of any major. I'd still say the big issue isn't that society doesn't want to value teachers, but that it's terrible at identifying good ones, so it ends up being a race-to-the-bottom.

> And that's partly because society doesn't value teachers as much as it should.

Speaking from Australia, I'd probably command enormous respect if I taught some kid programming. Compared to the median wage I'd be roughly doubling their earning power & I could get them a good desk job if they are smart-ish and try hard.

However, I'm legally barred from becoming a "teacher" because I don't have a masters degree in education.

This is probably the heart of why they don't command respect like they used to - it used to be that people worthy of respect became teachers. Now people worthy of respect become some other profession and aren't allowed to teach their high-value skills without jumping through hoops.

We also pay people based on how much power they have. People with lots of power and influence have more pull to ensure better pay for themselves. That power may come from being hard to replace, but it can also come from other things. Even bad CEOs that run their company into the ground, who really should get replaced, still draw significant pay on the way down, and may only be hard to replace because of the power they hold over the company.

But also: people don't get paid based on the value they create for society, but on the value they create for shareholders. So running a company into the ground may actually be short-term profitable for the shareholders if you manage to keep dividend payouts high. Parasitic companies extract value from society and give it to their shareholders. Lots of companies do enormous damage to various aspects of society, but as long as they don't have to pay for that damage, they can still be profitable for their shareholders.

Shareholder value is the biggest curse ever unleashed on/by capitalism.

Sir,

I disagree that shareholder value is a curse. I recommend The Visible Hand by Alfred D. Chandler Jr. who noted that over the last century there has been a shift from family-managed businesses to managerial-management which has more loyalty to themselves and abstract owners of the company, creating these kind of effects wherein a subsection of the managerial class can hop and skip through executive management irrespective of the tire fire they leave behind. Or, similarly, the churn and burn of certain speculators seeking immediate gain through capturing the business’s organizational structure to serve its own, as mentioned, selfish ends. Contrast this to the historical need for going to public markets, which is to quickly raise funding to continue to scale the scope of a business firm’s productive assets :)

There are software engineers with decades of highly specialized knowledge and skill whose day job is writing batch report scripts and tweak templates. They get paid a quarter of a million base. And they could be replaced in a heartbeat with a junior engineer: schlepping database queries into text files has been bread and butter for decades. It's the bugers-and-fries of programming.

Salaries don't correlate with value at all. It's a highly political thing.

> The best paying jobs are often parasitic. Like stock manipulation.

Or you could look at it as part of the process of allocating society’s resources towards more productive ventures from less productive ventures.

It is not the perfect mechanism, but if anyone has a better idea, they are welcome to share.

I would credit at least some people working in finance for opening up the ability for any financially illiterate person to participate in a country’s economic growth by easily being able to buy broad equity index ETFs at near zero cost.

A lot of people do not want to spend their time reading 10-K reports to figure out which businesses to invest in.

In theory that's true, but in practice the people at the top deciding what's profitable aren't working for maximising public good, so it doesn't work anymore

Who are the people at the top? How do they “decide” revenue minus expenses?

Are you claiming there is widespread fraud in SEC filings?

If you are referring to many industries becoming controlled by a handful of large organizations, then people working in trading and finance have nothing to do with that. That is in the political arena.

I presume he's talking about Congress, and by 'deciding' he's talking about them making regulations that effectively have the US government underwrite long tail risks while leaving profits privatized for larger financial institutions.

I understood mcv’s comment about “stock manipulation” being part of the highest paying jobs to refer to people working in finance, such as HFTs.

HFTs are definitely what I was thinking about. I remember reading about "quants", brilliant engineers working for investment banks to optimise their HFT algorithms, because that pays more than using their skills to invent or build things that are actually useful to society.

But the same is true for many other professions. I also remember reading that the highest paid engineers are working for Google and Facebook to optimise ad placement. CEOs get paid a lot even if their company does things that harm society. There's an entire industry just to help large companies avoid paying tax.

I'm not talking about specific people, just in general. People making decisions in companies are looking for revenue, and what brings money isn't necessarily aligned with public good.

A lot of things that would be good for people/society have no good way of really being profitable (unless lawmakers do something to rebalance the game to somehow help them).

And a lot of things that are profitable are objectively bad for society.

I agree, but I did not get that context because it seems unrelated to my response to mcv.

Not the OP, but "the people at the top" fall into a few categories in my mind...

- Career politicians who are more interested in maintaining office than working for the public good.

- Corporate executives who prioritize profit/stock price over the common good. The Sackler family comes to mind.

- Financiers (of various types) who accumulate personal wealth to the detriment of the common good.

It's possible to be a good politician or a good executive and not be "evil", but there are enough notable examples of the worst of both that both careers are somewhat sullied in the public eye. And of course, it's all shades of gray.

How exactly are you equating "stock manipulation" with the ability to "buy broad equity index ETFs at near zero cost" ?

That's clearly not what the OP was referencing.

In an adjacent post, OP writes they were referencing quants and HFT. I would credit them with helping increase automation and increasing liquidity that allow for the extremely low expense ratios of index ETFs and target date funds. Investing used to be much more expensive and investments were less liquid.

It's not the case though that what's most "productive" in the economic sense is also necessarily the most socially desirable outcome. The economy might be optimizing for some objective of productivity (though it's probably imperfect at that by any measure), but I don't think we can reduce it to something simple like "more overall money / goods / services = better", unless we also start looking in more detail at how those are distributed among different groups of people, and what kind of real value it is providing to them.

Of course. But that is again, in the purview of the political arena. Nevertheless, society’s resources are limited, need to be allocated, and hence the work that many do in finance.

A better way is always welcome, but I have yet to read about it or see it.

Yeah, David Graeber has even written a whole book on the subject: Bullshit Jobs [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bullshit_Jobs

Interesting downside of human psychology/market dynamics, if many want to help others e.g. as nurses or teachers, that positive trait is punished financially due to the high number of applicants

Also, if you want to help others, the fact that you can do so is itself used as compensation. Greed is rewarded a lot more than altruism.

“teachers, that positive trait is punished financially due to the high number of applicants”

There are teachers shortages throughout the country. States are rushing to reduce certification standards. “A high number of applicants” isn’t the cause of low teacher wages.

Low wages are the reason for low applicants. High standards are another reason for low applicants.

There are multitudes, and they differ across the country. I will add though that “high standards” in many states is as low a bar as ‘generic bachelors degree’ and/or ‘experience relevant to content area’ and the shortage persists.

When I went to school teachers didn't need a bachelors degree they went to teacher college for a year or two. Requiring a bachelors hasn't increased educational outcomes either just added gatekeeping.

Non-public schools can, of course, hire anyone they like. In many - if not most - states, principals in public schools are empowered to hire anyone with relevant experience under emergency licensure laws.

I don’t disagree with your point necessarily, but I also don’t believe it is a significant concern in most places.

Also, horrible work life balance. Partner is a teacher and works till 9 every night.

Yeah, the "passion tax" is real unfortunately. :/

100%. And we don't need to look far for examples: game studios treat their staff rather poorly too. Supposedly for the same passion tax reasons.

Isn't the truth really that those are simply jobs a lot of people can do and hence, don't attract much compensation? I would also wonder if there's a way to differentiate oneself in the market so that a good teacher could improve my salary much beyond that of the mean, than an average teacher.

Agreed. Why is that though?

The best paying jobs are generally the most scalable jobs, as you can derive income from/add value to more revenue streams with minimal time cost on your part.

That doesn't automatically correlate with parasitical roles, but there is an overlap.

Might have some truth to it. Human attention does not scale (ie. impact many other people) very well, and jobs where human attention is crucial, like in teaching & care, don't pay very well.

Yeah, a lot of that motivation lends itself to rent seeking rather than adding value

"Feeling like your job is rewarding to you" is part of the compensation, and to a certain extent trades off against actual money.

Intersection of supply curve of people able and willing to do the work and demand curve of people able and willing to pay.

Because people who value specifics about a career or have a passion do it more out of that passion because they know it doesn't come with high pay. Take teaching for example.

Also people working for non profit or other socially beneficial companies probably know the company budget goes to help more people not to pad CEO pockets...

The lowest rung of essential jobs are the easiest ones to get so those most desperate for income basically are forced into legal slavery.

And it is slavery. In Texas to rent a 1 bedroom apartment you need to work over 90 hours per week, assuming you earn twice minimum wage, maybe even more...

Those who take the soulless jobs are taking jobs reserved for people just like them who value money above everything else and who will walk over anybody to get it. They're not as likely to have imposter syndrome because they lack humility and are narcissistic. So they're not as likely to be a pushover and accept standard pay...

I wish we all could just earn the same amount but society has decided in a weird way who gets to thrive and we gets to barely survive.. It's not fair but it is what it is.

> I wish we all could just earn the same amount

In your society, what is the incentive for someone to clean up diarrhea in a gas station restroom?

Said society has fairly simply automated self-cleaning restrooms.

It’s really not that hard, or expensive.

Based on the fact that they are not in widespread use already, and I have never heard or seen one, it seems reasonable to assume that they do not exist, or are very expensive, or have some other limitation.

I would be interested in looking at a link for these bathrooms that do not require human labor for upkeep.

Either way, the point is different types of work exist with different difficulties/desirabilities, and people need incentives to do the less desirable and/or more difficult work.

If you expect people to slog through medical textbooks and training for 12 years to earn the same as someone checking out groceries, you might be living on a different planet.

Hard to imagine you’re posting in good faith when using the search engine of your choice with text “self cleaning restroom” comes up with more than enough.

That said, don’t think further debate with you will be anything close to fruitful.

edit:

In the year 2022, anything on the internet containing close to

> I have never heard or seen one

Very much leads me to believe the poster has an incurable case of brain worms

A product being available and a viable product worth buying are different things.

I work in real estate development, and we have built gas stations and hotels, and very recently. Either we are wasting a ton of money by employing janitors and housekeepers by not knowing a viable self cleaning bathroom exists, or there is some other problem with self cleaning bathrooms.

>I have never heard or seen one

>Very much leads me to believe the poster has an incurable case of brain worms

Or it means that self cleaning bathrooms would be such an amazing innovation that every single new retail/hotel/gas station/convention center/Starbucks/airport and ANY place with a public restroom would rush to install.

And yet it is, objectively, not seen anywhere by me in SF/SEA/NYC/PDX/LA.

What is more likely? That the product, if it exists, has severe limitations which make it uneconomical. Or a post on HN is correct that all these airports/hotels/malls I go to, with recent renovations or new builds, simply did not know about them.

I looked up self cleaning restrooms and how to purchase. They are extremely expensive 300,000-500,000 USD and break constantly due to vandalism.

They appear to be very hard and very expensive in practice.

You may be thinking of self cleaning toilets which are not relevant to this discussion.

If current society can build things that land on the moon & mars, along with nuclear ICBMs among other things, but cannot build a self cleaning restroom, perhaps it deserves to fail.

I do however think that is not the case, & that it is a comparatively simple issue nobody has given too much of a fuck about yet, as highly capitalistic societies give zero fucks about improving anything the general public may have access to.

Those other things have almost no budget or even have to worry about maintenance beyond the first use (rockets startups are potentially changing that of course).

I think you are overly pessimistic. There has never more a better time in history for a person with an idea to get funding for crazy ideas like this because of capitalism. They just have to make money.

For an idea like this to be worth it and succeed, it has to be cheaper than that person willing to do it manually. High minimum wages and benefits like single payer health insurance will definitely speed this up.

People who clean up diarrhea in public bathrooms don't get paid well. I did it a few times at a job where I was making minimum wage.

The question is in the context of a hypothetical society where everyone is paid the same.

In our current society, cleaning diarrhea in bathrooms is low pay is a consequence of lack of UBI (i.e. incentive to feed and house yourself) and high supply of people willing and able to do the job of cleaning bathrooms. Although, with a combination of lower fertility rates and lower immigration rates, I expect that to change.

No, that's not what slavery means. Stop redefining words because you want them to have more of an impact.

This behavior has become very trendy over the last decade or so and it's frankly quite literally genocide.

No, the context makes it very clear that the parent is not redefining slavery.

So a 1 bed appt in the state of Texas costs $1300 a week?

Because taking advantage of market failures is much easier to profit from than producing actual value, and neoliberal political ideologies prevent us from correcting for that with regulation.

Please, feel free to share one single example me of a job you can "produce value" without being out-competed by a machine and/or computer.

I'd value my kids being taught well, me taken care of if I'm in a hospital or old etc. No machine can compete with the human care. Machine can help, but not replace a human.

This is not a satisfactory answer. First, "human care" is not a direct way of "producing value". Second, if these are the only " interesting jobs" we should be taking, how would society be able to afford it?

Because people trade salary for ethical values. Many are are willing to do ethically good things for less (or no) money. You have a full spectrum:

- save the whales, feed the homeless, maintain Linux distributions: 0 money

- clean floors in some company: $

- software development for the average company: $$$

- software development in "fintech", real estate, make weapons, or other somewhat questionable thing: $$$$$

- write algorithms in some FAANG to manipulate people using ads: $$$$$$

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