Wage suppression – not stagnation – is costing workers $10 an hour (2021)
thehill.com
thehill.com
Is it being supported by the current corrupt administration or has it been supported by all the corrupt administrations. Rhetorical, I know.
Our grocery costs continue to rise, media streaming has gone up, nearly everything has gone up and drastically just the past 2 years alone yet wages being offered are from 10-20 years ago.
In my fair city you're lucky to find talent under $200/hr.
"Can I pay you a higher rate to take on project Z?"
"Nah man I'm as busy as I want to be. Maybe next year."
I'm sure he does the work in half the time stated, which is fine by me.
If you're hiring a non-employee contractor through some other company for $200/hr ... the SWE making $60/hr might just be that same person. Taxes, benefits, and overhead are very expensive.
Worth it for the flexibility, IMO.
$200 an hour is FAANG rates, at least, but there's an entire economy outside of that.
For example, I know a guy who does custom software development for a sawmill in rural Maryland. They don't pay $500k (I think they pay $180k), but he seems pretty happy with his McMansion and 4 kids in private schools. So long as your housing costs aren't in the $1 million range, you can have a lot of disposable income with less money.
Bro I have over ten years of dev experience, dozens of significant bug bounties including well-known projects like Chromium and Github, am a great competitive coder (love leetcode and codewars type challenges), and my brother makes much more money fixing air conditioners than I do as a dev.
Appsec is my specialty but my background is in React frontend (Node and Flask backend).
If it's hard for me, it must be brutal for new grads and people just coming out of bootcamps. I'm lucky that I focused on open source instead of going to college, because when I started looking for work I already had a portfolio and real experience, plus FOSS friends.
If anyone is looking for an appsec person who can find vulnerabilities, report them in a way that clearly explains the issue to other devs, and then write patches, please do reach out. Glad to work for WAY less than $60 an hour lol.
Currently I'm a freelancer, can show projects I've worked on. I don't mind hoops at all, send me a coding challenge or CTF or whatever you want :)
> Glad to work for WAY less
That might be the issue, that kind of work is worth more.
> instead of going to college
It's fine if you just want to have work. But won't cut it if you'd like a coveted job, as your resume is filed to /dev/null within minutes. Ask me how I know.
What do you mean by moved up?
I have more work than I can even do - but I may have a different idea of what a coveted job is.
>That might be the issue, that kind of work is worth more.
ikr <3
"More work than I can do" ---> raise your rates; econ 101.
I recommend the patio11 piece about charging more, should be easy to find at the search box at the bottom of the page.
But as mentioned, at times of slowdown expect a lower upside.
Right now I'm focused on something other than making tons of money tbh. There's a job I covet, so I've been just focusing on maxxing relevant skills so I can join this elite club of extremely cool people working on this very cool thing.
But after that I'm gonna go back to money, for sure.
Btw I love your blog. That same essay "How to be a hacker" is the one I consulted as a teenager, which led me to switch from QBASIC (my first lang, on the recommendation of an IRC channel that was probably trolling me) to Python.
Whenever I see this argument, the effect is basically to kill my trust in anything else the author says. I'm not aware of any historical examples where simply running up inflation to fight inequality worked (Turkey's Gini increased during the "Erdoganomics" 2019-22). And the "MMT" doesn't seem to have a good theoretical footing either. I'm generally sympathetic to leftist economic ideals. But the persistence of so much mumbo-jumbo keeps me at a distance.
The current period is interesting and deserves its own study, but I think it’s too early to come to any conclusions, although we all have our own intuition. Mine is that raising interest rates to combat a supply crunch seems like not the best tool for the job.
If I have a factory that makes widgets, and I pay a skilled worker to laboriously craft one widget at a time by hand, and then I invent a machine that allows unskilled workers to make tens of widgets at a time, why would those workers see any increase in pay at all? In fact, their pay would likely go down, because now I can hire unskilled labor instead of skilled craftsman.
The benefits of technology will always be exponentially unequal.
Did an early investor in Facebook do more work than an early investor in Pets.com?
>Did an early investor in Facebook do more work than an early investor in Pets.com?
It's quite possible that an investor who does more research, spends more time networking with smart young people, etc, would have to do more work in order to invest in better things.
And even if not, meritocracy means rewarding the quality of work, not just the quantity. Making smart investments should pay better than making dumb ones, even if it's not more work.
That’s what technology is supposed to do, make less labor for everyone not entrench power dynamics
So yeah I guess the answer is just so obviously singular that capital should be the primary beneficiary from technology
Capitalism needs workers who can afford to buy the products, too.
Not that I disagree that would be nice, but what's the incentive to the company owner to do that under capitalism? As a purely business decision, you'd fire the highly paid experts and replace them with lower-paid less-expert labor. Which is exactly what's been going on with layoffs in the tech sector, just without the magic productivity multiplying machine, so this is not theoretical.
So, carry on I guess?
It's also not just capital that benefits. It's being able to direct capital that benefits. If it takes the same amount of skill and work to make a widget as it does to run a cashier, why should the widget-maker get a higher wage? The owners that direct capital towards widget making will benefit more than owners directing capital towards retail.
That is bad for society in the long run
The man who can make and use the spear and the atlatl will outpace the man still throwing rocks. It doesn't matter what the structure of society is.
I upvoted you and I’m quoting here so that I can reference this later when somebody questions why we need things like unions to protect them from narcissistic psychopaths
I struggle with this. Yes, it seems almost a law of nature that fitness begets more fitness. But surely we can structure society to be above mere nature?
So what's the mechanism to protect against it?
Market forces don't seem to work too well.
Corporate taxes would/should work, if our government weren't also co-opted by capital?
Unions?
UBI?
It is stupid too throw good, reliable people away especially in manufacturing.
1) Company sees explosive growth, pays workers a lot, workers spend a lot.
2) Company growth slows, reduces worker benefits, reduces raise frequency, workers restrict spending a bit.
3) Company growth screeches to a halt, layoffs ensure, benefits reduced more, bonuses for workers nixed, workers heavily restrict spending.
All this happening alongside inflation (standard or not) is where we're at now. Capitalism punishes that maintain stability in line with inflation, constant and unmanageable growth is what is rewarded. But constant growth is not possible, there's always a ceiling, always a limit, a finite amount of customers, a finite amount of money to be paid.
"Growth for the sake of growth is the ideology of the cancer cell". We have to have a cultural shift over what is considered success in business, because this isn't sustainable.
Inflation robs the working class of power without ever having to get so much as a bill past congress, and it's no accident.
The "Inflation reduction act" should have been nothing more than a bill that locks automatic increases to the minimum wage to accumulated inflation. The fact that it was anything else means it wasn't about reducing inflation at all, because the only way to do that is to destroy money. The only way to reduce the impact of inflation is to raise wages. The bill did neither, of course.
Studying minimum wage increases between 1978 and 2015:
> we find prices grow by 0.36 percent for every 10 percent increase in the minimum wage.
https://research.upjohn.org/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?referer=&htt...
Firstly, minimum wage is politically unpopular in most areas. Keep in mind the median voter is older or retired and cares more about expenses than income. So even modest cost of living increases can have huge political repercussions.
Secondly, minimum wages are very inefficient as a poverty reduction policy. For every dollar you impose on businesses, a % is going to be eaten by inflation, a % is going to into reduced labor demand, and a % is going to families well above the poverty line (second or third household earners).
This is why you see lots of Western countries not even bother with them.
(Minimum wage as a policy to induce immigration - that's another story).
In the US raising the minimum wage is wildly popular, with 89% wanting to raise it some amount and 62% supporting $15/hr.
> For every dollar you impose on businesses, a % is going to be eaten by inflation, a % is going to into reduced labor demand, and a % is going to families well above the poverty line (second or third household earners).
Only if you assume a perfectly efficient labor market, which is often far from how things play out in studies regarding the minimum wage.
> This is why you see lots of Western countries not even bother with them.
There are only a handful of western countries without a minimum wage and most of them either have very strong collective bargaining, a strong social safety net with some form of guaranteed minimum income, or both. I think those are reasonable policies but they aren't what opponents of the minimum wage are generally advocating for.
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/04/22/most-amer...
You’re so wrong it’s actually astounding: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/04/22/most-amer... https://www.dataforprogress.org/blog/2023/5/24/725-isnt-cutt... https://www.graydc.com/2023/04/21/study-finds-that-23-americ...
> This is why you see lots of Western countries not even bother with them. Again you’re just so wrong: most of Europe has a much better adjusted minimum wage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_European_Union_member_...
> Secondly, minimum wages are very inefficient as a poverty reduction policy. For every dollar you impose on businesses, a % is going to be eaten by inflation, a % is going to into reduced labor demand, and a % is going to families well above the poverty line (second or third household earners).
Just wrong again:
https://www.rwjf.org/en/insights/our-research/2022/08/explor...
https://www.brookings.edu/articles/higher-regional-minimum-w...
https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/poverty/3636046...
Even the CBO generally disagrees with your falsehoods: https://www.cbo.gov/publication/55681
Why spread misinformation?
You can see this in the huge predicted decline in Real Family Income (most of that is only felt by people in middle class or above, but still, if this is just a redistribution mechanism there are more efficient ways to do that).
“ How would increasing the minimum wage affect the number of people in poverty? By boosting the income of low-wage workers with jobs, a higher minimum wage would lift some families’ income above the poverty threshold and thereby reduce the number of people in poverty. But low-wage workers who lost employment would see their earnings decrease, and in some cases their family income would fall below the poverty threshold. The first effect would tend to be larger than the second, so the number of people in poverty would generally fall.”
Yes there would be job losses but that effect is shown to not be nearly as large as the number of people lifted out of poverty.