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Comment by paganel | Hacker News Reader

> Obviously the high wages in tech are an upward drag on all other wages, so it's logical to focus on this area.

If you're looking at it through Keynes's perspective there's not a lot of investment that the highly-paid tech workers actually carry out with their total comps, many of them just save most of it in view of early retirement. According to Keynes that's bad, it's just money left not doing anything in view of the famous accumulation.

Supposedly, the money spent on those very high comps would be better spent by the companies themselves carrying out their own investments, and if not successful in doing that then those companies should return the money to the shareholders so that the latter would carry out their own investments. In either case, there would be higher chances of accumulation.

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Higher salary usually means higher spending, ie paying other people to work.

It seems to me that is much better than 'investing' aka buying ownership of people's work.

I mean, unless there's continual 'investment', someone has to actually pay for the work people do at some point, not just keep buying/paying for ownership of the work/profits they make.

Unless most tech workers are 50+, they would not be saving the majority of that money, but rather investing it in the stock market.

Investment rates and savings rates go hand in hand, and taking money from the upper middle class to give to the investor class is not sound economic policy. Savings don't depress investments, on the contrary they reduce capital costs and allow for more investment without inflation. Banks don't actually keep your money on hand, they lend almost all of it out.

I don't know Keynes well enough to know if your take on his work is valid, but I do know that parts of his theories were found lacking 50 years ago in the last bout of stagflation.

> Investment rates and savings rates go hand in hand, and taking money from the upper middle class to give to the investor class is not sound economic policy.

The upper middle class at most is investing their money in index funds, gone are the days of angel investors who had made their money from Google comps. For the sake of argument, they're putting their money in the 2% investment funds.

The "investor class", supposedly, is putting their money in higher-risk but also in higher-reward vehicles/entities, let's say entities that get them a 5% ROI. That 5% > 2% has been the essence of capitalism development ever since the industrial revolution got going, i.e. we haven't gotten to this point by playing it safe and putting our past money in the 2% financial vehicles.

Presumably they save it by placing it into the market in lots of cases, no?

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