Why Speakers Earn 30k An Hour

One thing sort of hinted at but not explicitly mentioned is that the field you speak in makes a significant difference, especially at the lower end (really famous people will make out well in any case). If you can get onto the corporate speaking circuit, doing tutorials and lectures at corporate retreats, for example, there is a lot of that work, and it pays fairly well. This usually requires a sort of "pop" or "business" angle on your speaking. Even a very engaging lecture about advanced mathematics is not going to get you invited to most corporate retreats, but a lightly mathematically tinged anecdote, or a more business-focused lecture about using statistics to analyze markets, might do so.

I've noticed in game-design, for example, that over the past 1-2 years by far the best way to go if you want to make money speaking is to get into "gamification", talking about how companies can use game mechanics and badges for engagement and that kind of thing. Even if you're a better speaker when talking about actual game-design, the markets are just very differently sized, so it's more lucrative to give an "ok" talk about gamification (lots of clients) than a great talk about game-design (many fewer clients, unless you're Will Wright level).

>To put the numbers so far in this chapter in perspective, the average adult on planet Earth earns $8,200 a year (U.S. dollars). The average American makes about $45,000. Since you see your paycheck, you know exactly where you stand.

Bit of a tangential nitpick: I don't like that he used the averages here--I think he should have used the medians. Which, for Earth, is about $850 [0] and, for U.S.A., is about $30k-50k [0,1]. Even so, a single number doesn't give you a very good picture of the actual wealth distribution, but the median is better than the average (for chrissake!) in this case.

[0]: http://www.wisegeek.com/what-is-the-median-income-worldwide.... (I tried for a couple minutes to find a better source--sorry.)

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Median_household_income

Edit: And, overall, I found the excerpt to be rather fluffy, feel-goody, and sparse on content. Maybe I'm cheating here, but it seems like the kind of text that would make a fine talk, but a vacuous essay.

The discussion on the last time this was submitted : https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=927757

Well he also seems to forget the amount of effort but in by the speaker. Of course a more famous one will be paid more, (s)he has spent thousands of hours doing appearances, books, etc all to gain some notoriety, all without the assurance it will pay off or come back to them some day. 30k an hour just isn't accurate if you see all the effort over the years to pull it off and the pre and post work needed to be done per speaking engagement.

Does anyone have an opinion on the ethics of paying for speakers, in the context of a public conference?

I am fine with covering basic expenses, travel. What about significant speaker fees?

This only adds up if you think it makes sense for some many individuals to be allocated 10000x more resources for their leisure while the majority scrape to get by.

Its a very primitive belief system that actually predates social Darwinism and served as the inspiration for it.

In order to have an actual civilization, we will need to start to realize the differences between humans and common animals.