Positive labor sorting has been increasing for men in the last several decades
richmondfed.org
richmondfed.org
Guys are just better at convincing themselves (and by extension: others) they can do a thing when they can't — and people who can do more things get more money.
But from an employers perspective you loose out if you don't see theough that.
There's simply zero chance that you didn't have a single male student who could outcompete a female student at least once in any topic. Your eyes were ignorant with prejudice.
As with most generalizations, this isn't true every time.
> And it always turns out that the girl knows more.
Even had <i> always </i> in the statement. I don't think logically you and GP can both be in agreement.
If male students are silent or don't brag I treat them exactly the same way as I treat female students that are silent and don't brag. In the rare case of bragging female students I treat them the same as bragging male students.
And it being a trend means there have been all kind of outliers on all sides and into all directions.
Did you read the paper? Their data are from the Austrian social security registry from 1972 to 2007 [1]. None of this assumes a rational market; they're going out of their way to document a persistent possible irrationality.
[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24074/w240... § 3.1
"Sorting between workers and firms can have significant implications for wage inequality."
Those that believe that "high-ability workers" made themselves, that market valuation of a person is fair and reflects what that person deserves, will also view this positive correlation as positive.
Those that see otherwise, e.g. that grok the Matthew Effect[1], systemic prejudice in society, that no human created themselves, or that humans should not be "priced" like commodities, will not. As the paper points out:
There is sorting everywhere in the economy:
- Wealthier, more educated, more attractive men on average marry wealthier, more educated, more attractive women.
- Higher-income households reside in distinct neighborhoods and send their children to better schools than low-income households.
- Elite universities enroll the most qualified undergraduates.
Even believing those things, why would you not still see it as positive? Would it be better if high-performing people worked for lower-performing companies? Wouldn't an inability for higher-performing workers to move to higher-performing companies reflect a lack of worker freedom?
Most luck you or I have wouldn't exist is if someone close to us decided to coast or fuck up instead of making sure to cash keep cashing in those lottery tickets every day
If we could take half the 120+ IQ folks working at high frequency trading firms or on online advertisements and scatter them to work in local trade businesses, restaurants, civil services, etc, I think it’d be a net positive.
Such a waste
money.
Example: society wants more quality teachers, so society chooses to increase the federal education budget to increase teacher salaries. Consequently, more highly educated people choose to become teachers, however, this unintentionally exacerbates the doctor shortage and further increases corporate lawyer salaries due to decreased supply of lawyers.
for what it is worth, IQ of 120 is pretty tame e.g. 1 in 10 people and I think there are lots of smart people that DO work in trades, restaurants, and civil services. I am friends with many .
But then again, I disagree with your premise that these other careers are intelligence starved - some of my smartest friends do them.
I think rather those careers are simply more stifling and less creative. That is to say your HFT seems flashy because they are doing novel work in a developing area. If they were in the civil service, they probably wouldn't be reinventing the wheel, but just an efficient bureaucrat.
I don’t believe everyone working in e.g. food service is dumb (nor that everyone working in adtech or HFT is smart), only that the distribution is probably quite extremely uneven.
There is plenty of space for creativity and novel thinking within bureaucracies, trades, service industries, etc., and that is exactly the reason it’d be great to have a more even distribution of smart people into them.
An efficient bureaucrat can navigate themselves to the right place to make a huge amount of impact on people’s actual daily lives at scale. That’s a good thing!
On the whole you can think that there's Company A and Company B, where both produce different amounts of value. There's an optimal state of how much each company should be funded in order for optimal value production from both together. The more accurate you are with allocating funds the best are the gains.
So in that sense it's not zero sum.
It's zero sum within the system. The existence of HFT as a whole is positive sum, though I agree that the compensation differential attributed to it outclasses that sum by a large measure.
There’s an element of Feinman’s spinning, wobbling plates [1]. The problems one must solve to push latency ever lower have knock-on effects.
> whereas earlier you could say that tighter spreads and more liquidity helps other market participants
The guarantee of being nipped curtails entire classes of dirty behaviour. Chunking out an order is smart, but it wasn’t always done. HFT, in this model, serves an adversarial regulatory function.
We also have the basic fact that, in a Ricardian sense, folks are trading with that HFT shop over their slower competitors. At some infinitesimal level, the counterparty chose (and was delivered on) that preference.
[1] https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/article-abstract/75/3/240/1056...
Of course I’m suspicious of any system that claims to be able to globally optimize in this way, but I do think it’d be better for almost everyone if we could.
What I’m suggesting is that we shouldn’t have, increasingly, one end of our economy operated largely by 90-110 IQ folks and one end operated largely by 120+ IQ folks. Especially when the end operated by the 90-110 folks is the one that 99% of people are actually interacting with on a daily basis and when the 120+ IQ end has a propensity to produce extremely intense, near-zero sum competitions that drive the net value of their intelligence to near-zero.
If I am understanding your definition of "tame", you think that being a 1-in-10 person in terms of intelligence is not significant, right?
If so, I beg to differ; coming first in a race of 10 people is a huge differentiator of abilities.
>If so, I beg to differ; coming first in a race of 10 people is a huge differentiator of abilities
IQ, by its very nature, doesnt shed much light on comparative performance. I would say there are big differences top to bottom, but you probably wouldnt be able to tell the difference in ability between the 1st and 2nd person out of 10.
Per my value system, what we want is to match people to work that they are good at, and for any particular ability, we want to match people who have more ability to societal needs that are more important. "Higher performing company" does not equate to "more important company". I'm glad Einstein chose to be a physicist rather than be a Facebook engineer (or whatever the equivalent was in his time). I don't believe anyone should be billionaires or fabulously wealthy, but if I did, it would be people like Einstein, not Mark Zuckerberg, or people like Musk who would have paid Einstein some minimal market-driven amount more than Princeton would have (from the government subsidies Must gets) while convincing people he (Musk) is responsible for all the great technological advances resulting from Einstein's work, keeping all the profits for himself and pouring them into even more extractive schemes.
> Wouldn't an inability for higher-performing workers to move to higher-performing companies reflect a lack of worker freedom?
Doesn't the inability of lower-performing workers to not be coerced into working for slave wages under slave conditions represent a lack of freedom? What about the children of lower-performing workers who are locked into poorer schools, poorer nutrition, poorer environments, less quality time with their parents and many other disadvantages?
And what if higher-performing companies are those that are best at extracting the most value out of bottom-level workers, effectively acting as intermediate slave owners for consumers who get cheap goods on the backs of bottom-level workers and their lack of freedom?
But state and federal funding supplements local tax school funding to achieve approximately equal funding per pupil, and the US is 4th in the world (behind only Luxembourg, Norway, and Iceland) in per-student primary education spending [1]. So what makes those schools "good"?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/238733/expenditure-on-ed...
We’re in Cambridge, MA (one high school for the entire city). I bet the correlations among parents’ academic achievement, household income, parental involvement, and kids’ scholastic accomplishment are all positive or strongly positive. (There cannot be a difference in school, being only one.)
Bingo. It's parenting. I won't go into how I can positively confirm this, but I can as a "captain" as reddit used to refer to it...
Wealthy areas still out fund raise, out tax, and out volunteer poorer areas.
Why should an arbitrary child whose parents are paying 100,000 INR in India end up with better start to finish improvement over an arbitrary child in the US whose government is spending $17,000? Here are the numbers adjusted to match:
100,000 INR converts to $1,202
India's PPP coefficient is 3.5x
Therefore, 100,000 INR is equivalent to $4,200 in the US.
A quarter of the spending and the start-to-finish delta is much higher there. The reason we can't do that here is multifaceted, but maybe the answer is looking to how their schools do it.
This is not wage inequality because these are not equal things. More productive employees are not equal to less productive ones. Productive men are not equal to less productive (article's words not mien) women. If 2 different things are not equal, then there is no inequality.
> Therefore, stronger sorting contributes to widening the gap between high and low earners.
The gap between labor and labor is insignificant compared to the gap between labor and capital.
The paper is saying that higher-earning men are more likely to work for companies which pay higher wages (to all their employees). Put another way, 100 men who are equally high-earning across their work experience are not randomly distributed in high- and low- wage companies, but are more concentrated in high-wage companies.
In the HN context, maybe it makes sense to say "higher-earning men are more likely to get jobs at FAANG rather than earn the same amount at Microsoft/some non-OpenAI startup/a bank".
Based on the average wage of a persons lifetime, how close will each job a person take be to that expected wage, assuming it is adjusted for time and inflation. Same question for the employer in terms of what they pay employees.
It's nice to have some data, but we still don't know what to do.
Highest wage firms have to be faang, by number of employees right? Private equity and top legal positions being fewer.
Yes, then there is tech, and it often does prove to pay the best for high skilled work like software development, and thats great. Lets not forget before google, samsung, and microsoft had cloud storage, there was another semi-popular cloud storage company whos owner was raided and placed on house arrest for years. Nor should we forget that companies like twitter were taking government bribes to engage in censorship. Its not like everything thats happened in tech has been a product of the free market, there is quite a bit of government help thats helped solidify the market dominance of certain tech companies.