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Comment by collinmcnulty | Hacker News Reader

Offshore oil rigs beg to differ. For almost any set of circumstances, there’s a salary that will entice people to fill the role. They just don’t want to shell out the mid six figure salary that would be required. It’s only a “breakdown” because we collectively feel entitled to have people fill the role but don’t want to actually pay what it costs.

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Salary is only part of the equation.

Offshore oil rigs deal in billions of dollars worth of hydrocarbons per day. The revenues make it feasible to offer high salaries and still generate massive returns. Many rural locations just aren't economically productive to justify the kinds of salaries necessary to draw people to them.

If we take for granted that "farm requires farmers, farmers require doctor", then the doctor should charge whatever market rate is for someone to work there, and the farmers should be paying that, drawing that from salary from the farm business, and that should be priced into the cost of the farm business's output?

Why can't the farms increase prices to support a basic quality-of-life for those living there?

I don't disagree there's some breakdown of the market here, but I'm not sure that saying "well there's not enough money coming in to the area" isn't stopping a step short.

I think farmers don't set their own prices, (there's nuance, but not really). They haul to middlemen who pay what they pay. Sometimes they even sell to transport companies / truckers that buy it to haul it to middlemen, both of whom pay what they can pay.

In that setting, the "regional" middlemen have the power to set prices, not the farmers, so a distant farmer from a poor community has no leverage over what teachers are paid in their community.

Generally speaking, I think almost all locally-produced, distributed industries work this way, by aggregating many producers the middleman has a ton of power to set prices, but of course is subject to the prices set by the next tier up, all the way to the commodities exchange, from what I can tell.

Anyway, this "averaging over a large area" ruins local economic efficiency.

Doesn’t Australia also deal in billions in mineral revenue in these remote locations? Seems the money is in the area just the revenues aren’t being captured in a way to fund the teaching.

Human entitlement really is the bane of game theory.

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