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Comment by chazhaz | Hacker News Reader

...and about twice what it was 50 years ago. How have Sweden, Japan, France, etc. managed to keep income inequality around postwar lows while America hasn't?

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Not sure, but it seems in France the situation in degrading. The same 1% being richer while workers / students waiting in line for food charity stories were common. Part of it might be due to COVID, but I can't shake the feeling that business management (influenced by anglo-saxon/american culture) is harder than before and squeezes employees. Not only a feeling, I worked on precarious jobs that shouldn't exist, and we saw employees having materially impossible daily duties (due to bad software unable to organize things).

I suspect that people self-manage a lot more if the pay is right. If they stop doing that it seems like you need a more expensive manager, or perhaps you do.

well partly but my comment was more systemic, a lot of "new management" was about naive quantitative approaches. measure stupid traces / outputs and forcing people to hit target objectives without looking at the workflow, tooling and team dynamics

people with enough skill and compatible mindsets need no management, they care, they will innovate, improve, repair

if the structure is at odds with that, they will ask to compensate the pain by large salary bumps because pleasure is turned into pain

Americans voted to give rich people more money and those countries didn't.

> How have Sweden, Japan, France, etc. managed to keep income inequality around postwar lows while America hasn't?

They didn’t import millions of poor people to do all the dirty or unpleasant jobs in their countries.

Japan didn't, but France and Sweden does have a lot of immigrants.

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