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Comment by roenxi | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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 :)

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