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Comment by fdgsdfogijq | Hacker News Reader

The crazy thing is it feels like wages are really set by the standard of living. Most corporate jobs are paying just enough to afford a decent place to live, a vacation, and then putting away a few thousand in savings. This idea that we live in this meritocracy and you get paid for the value you create is completely bunk. Were all basically accepting a livable wage like cattle being farmed for value by rich people.

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The standard of living rises with wages because we spend those wages on our standard of living. There's some segments like education and health care that are just broken vampires sucking up resources. In some places housing gets added to that list due to zoning. But for the most part people are getting better things for the same effort of working than they used to.

Is there really that much to standard of living after you exclude education, health care, and housing? What's left? Eating out and electronics?

Cars, hobby stuff, furniture, appliances, and so on

>The crazy thing is it feels like wages are really set by the standard of living.

this is basically guaranteed to be the case because in urban areas, the biggest expense is housing, which is inherently a positional good. Paying more wouldn't help, because everyone would just bid up the prices on housing and negate any nominal increase.

Right, but its like no matter the field, the standard deviation between the pay is pretty low. Sales, programming, project management, manager, account manager. For the average outcome, they all make +-50k with a 150k median. The wages are not being set by economic value except on the top end for programming/executive/higher management. Its being set by the employer based on a base standard of living.

The capital holders are taking all of the excess wealth created

>The wages are not being set by economic value except on the top end for programming/executive/higher management. Its being set by the employer based on a base standard of living.

The fallacy here is thinking that prices was ever or should be set by "economic value". It plays a role, but only as an upper bound; you can't price something that's higher than the value it provides. Many goods/services (eg. food or healthcare) arguably provides infinite value to the purchaser, given that they're required for survival, but I doubt you'd come out to argue that we should reprice them according to their "economic value".

>The capital holders are taking all of the excess wealth created

This feels like a tautology to me, because you're defining "excess wealth" as (economic value generated) - (wages/expenses paid), which is just a roundabout way of saying "profits".

That's one factoring. A different factoring is that the excess wealth is (economic value) - (expenses paid)

And that there's a ratio of profit vs wages taken out of that. That ratio can be larger or smaller. If that ratio is 1, there is no wages, and if it's 0, there is no profit.

The comment is that that ratio is too close to 1.

> That's one factoring. A different factoring is that the excess wealth is (economic value) - (expenses paid)

That factoring wouldn't make sense in the context of the original comment, because it also claims that "The capital holders are taking all of the excess wealth created", which clearly isn't the case because we're not paying everyone $0 in wages.

In order to benefit directly from your value creation you have to get out from under the protective shell of an org owned by someone else. This means both the risk, and rewards, are yours. If you are unwilling to do this then you will always be at the mercy of those whom you look at to shield you from the risks.

This comment shows an extremely privileged perspective.

Most corporate jobs are paying just enough to afford a [deleted: decent] place to live, [deleted: a vacation, and then putting away a few thousand in savings].

This is a complete fallacy too. We are working harder now than people did before the industrial revolution.

1) [citation needed]

2) even if this is true, at least we're not, I dunno, dying in our 30s and have things like running water?

Productivity has gone way up in the last few decades, and people can afford fewer and fewer children. It used to be common to afford 8 children on one income. Wake up dude

>Productivity has gone way up in the last few years, and people can afford fewer and fewer children.

That doesn't say much when that's been the long run trend since the industrial revolution.

Isn't it "only the poorest can afford children" situation?

Having fewer children should be celebrated not looked upon as a failure. The world doesn't need everyone having six kids anymore.

I'm not arguing for having that many children, just that its a basic way to benchmark how expensive being alive is. Clearly these people having so many children werent just randomly taking on impoverished hardship. Things were tight, but they had reasonable economic security with so many children. This points to a dramatic drop in wages in the last 50 years

Financially speaking, kids are an asset in non-industrialized societies, especially farming societies. But they are a liability in industrialized ones. I think that transition from asset to liability for nations undergoing industrialization might explain this phenomenon.

I really hope when people have kids they don't look at them as an asset or a liability, aside from when considering the financial impact. They're not a great fit for our lifestyle, but if my wife and I did end up having a kid I wouldn't think of them as a liability.

I think you're stuffing more meaning into my statement than I intended: I intentionally qualified the statement to the financial perspective only in which case it's appropriate to talk about assets and liabilities.

I say this as a happy father of 2 kids.

No one is saying we need 8, but many aren't having 1.

And the people who are crapping out kids may not be the ones you'd like to be carrying the torch forward into the next century.

Who are you building this future for if not for your children and those of your friends and family?

Tell me that the Quiverfull types who are having 10 kids are the ones who will appreciate your new app and I'll tell you you're full of crap.

Hey now. I was one of eight myself, am now a highly educated (Washington & Lee, Oxford University) and successful (team lead) software developer, and fully intend on having a large family myself. Don't make insulting generalizations like that.

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