The 1830's reform of the UK, which begrudging wrestled power from the Lords and distributed voting power more evenly over the UK (rammed cities like Manchester had almost no voting rights), only happened when some of the Lords houses were close to being burned down.
Thankfully the UK didn't follow France into the anarchy that was the French Revolution, and Earl Grey could make them see reason. But damn did we come close.
The threat of violence that the worker wielded against their employer was indeed a good incentive to keep things amicable.
Nowadays, we don't know where the Lords necessarily live, the size of the Lords private armies don't need to be more than a handful of security guards, and AI/Robotics is diminishing the need for that handful of guards at all.
For those unfamiliar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution . Which from the UK's PoV had lead to a hellishly long, expensive, bloody, and existential series of wars. Right on the UK's doorstep. The memories of which were very much living in 1832, to undermine the usual "can't happen here" motivated reasoning of the 1%.
And it took further horrors, including the Great Famine in Ireland, to get the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_laws repealed in 1846. Which, arguably, was a far greater reform - destroying the economic foundations of most of the wealthy land owners, and greatly reducing how many poor folks lived on the brink of "if you can't afford the food prices..." starvation.
ADDED:
> Nowadays, we don't know where the Lords necessarily live, the size of the Lords private armies don't...
Sadly, it's far more complex than that. While amoral billionaires and mega-corps get the headlines, late-stage capitalism has very efficiently allocated nice-sounding slivers of its loot to a huge number of minor stakeholders. Pretty much everyone who has savings (for retirement or whatever) invested in equities. Pretty much every homeowner. And pretty much everyone who still believes that they'll somehow manage to break into those "just sit there and watch your wealth grow" classes.
Ultimately, businesses offer poor compensation because they can get away with it and society has designed the economic model to support this. The economic model does not reward work, but rather ownership of assets, and this principle exists throughout every nation. It's a society modelled around protectionism of wealth, where the wealthy can hand wealth down to their children.
In the United Kingdom, a third of people claiming government assistance are in employment. Over 50% of those buying their first home get gifted money from their parents to do so. Starting from nothing means playing a rigged game. It's like playing Monopoly, where one player starts out with half of the cards and everyone else thinks they can win if they strategise well enough.
Many core economic theories that are taught about productivity and pay are wrong. Anyone living in the real world can see that marginal productivity and price theory are wrong. If the game was perfectly fair, these theories may have some weight, however there's a multitude of factors that skew the board. Poor compensation does have consequences, and they may be felt by individual businesses. However, by and large, these consequences are offloaded on to the rest of society.
Neither of you mention creativity. The article too gives the impression that the world is made out of work (like turning a treadmill), and assets (inherently unfair). The point of it all is apparently to live, like a sessile sponge in the ocean, hence "living wage".
> Now at some point, the humans involved in handing out currency decided that too many people were living too nicely.
The origins of currency are mysterious. There were certainly some number of kings and tribal chiefs who minted coins and handed them out, mostly I think to soldiers. There were also traders using whatever coins and other small valuable objects. But I don't think anybody decided anything, except when messing around with taxes. I suppose company scrip comes closest to this vision, where your lack of money is determined by the mastermind who also creates it and hands it out and decides everybody's roles. That or communism. Generally no, it's not a rigged game, it's a messy brawl.
The core foundation of society is built around work. We trade our time, skills and attention for a pay check that allows us to sustain ourselves, our families, and that we can use as a means to achieve our goals. The key problem is that society devalues this work year after year, as those with assets are rewarded simply for holding a legal deed. Creativity can get you far when you have nothing, but there is a limit as to what it can achieve.
I disagree with the commenter that your replied to directly, who seems to believe the world is a zero-sum game. However it's also naive to believe that the game is not rigged, and that those who complain simply lack creativity.
In a healthy society, choosing to work to serve others 40 hours a week, should afford you the ability to acquire enough capital to buy a small house and start a family after 10 years. Unfortunately, this is now unachievable in many parts of the world.
The core theories aren’t necessarily wrong, I would say they are misapplied and misused to justify political stances. The science of economics does attempt to take in account as many factors as possible but that’s not the versions of the theories you will see discussed outside of the academic world because that becomes really complexe quickly and doesn’t paint a clear picture when we are looking for simple decisions. Just, don’t throw the baby, yada yada
Find a review of Dan Davies' The Unaccountability Machine and see what you think. I think that short term shareholder value may not be a good control variable given the state of the systems we navigate.
The core theories of economics seem correct, and in fact predict the current situation if used correctly. The problem is that the game has been systemicaly rigged. Employers have maximimized their legal leverage, while crushing all employee and subcontractor leverage. The central banks favors (and often rigs) the metrics that favor the rich (GDP, U3, CPI, etc), and ignore alteratives that favor labour. The government designs tax policy to favor integenerational wealth, and capital accumulation over income.
The new deal in America roughly got things correct, and was followed by the greatest expansion of the middle class in history. What we're suffering from today is the systematic destruction of that social contract.
This comes off as slightly on the entitled side. Yearly salaries at $100k+ is very high by Western European standards. I can only imagine what our Eastern European colleagues would feel about it. If you can live a comfortable life and send our children to school well fed perhaps broaden the horizons a bit before ranting off about how much better the world would be if you could be paid a bit more.
The point was that a $100k+ compensation for a software office work is among the highest in the world. If a comparison with another high compensation area falls flat, then maybe that says something.
Perhaps another US state would have been a better comparison. It might be hard for a software developer in Montana to identify with a Silicon Valley rant about salaries being too low.
It would not cross my mind personally to complain about low compensation for my skilled work, precisely because I know my collegaues from areas with lower compensation are just as skilled and earn less. In what way would the world be better off if I was better paid? If it helped my company increase their security posture then that would say more about the ineffective ways we organize work around here than anything else.
Great, I know people in Africa live on less than a dollar a day. How soon can you start working for me? I don't follow minimum wage or overtime laws, you're a gig worker
There is no reasonable metric by which one can claim US software devs are hard up I think is the point being made.
Everyone would like to make more but I was interpreting this thread as suggesting a us dev whining that as a field they’re being mistreated comes off a bit gauche
In the Netherlands many senior SWEs make €85K+ at the moment and that is what $100k+ is right now.
I'm writing this because I don't consider NL to be the top country in Europe where you can make a lot of money being a SWE. And I'm not talkin about FAANG salaries either, they are higher here.
The pressures he describes seem correct and mirror what I’ve seen.
Think he’s wrong about this being close to blowing up. Think that’s coloured by his own personal situation. I suspect unfortunately the powers that be correctly read the situation as significantly more room to squeeze.
It might read as bad to usa ears but keep in mind there are people breaking down ships with zero safety, zero job security, low pay, bad equipment and certain heath impact etc. People will bear crazy stuff and still show up to work
Yeah then it would be mouths to feed, there is always a greater crisis than the one you are facing. And this is the entire reason folks are willing to work for peanuts, I have worked for 1$ an hr, and 100$ an hr. Sure I was less skilled but I wasn't 100x less skilled.
The difference is my desperation for the job. I had to pay for my studies back when 1$ an hour seemed like more than nothing.
Now working for less than 50$ feels like being exploited. This is the matter of perspective and situation in life, you can never fix it for everyone in the world. There will always will be people like me who will work for 1$ an hour because they have needs to meet and scholarships or handouts don't make up for it all.
In ancient times, slaves didn't revolt because they were oppressed by weapons and violence. Instead of paying workers, resources were used to pay and feed the military. Slaves were considered "war bounty" and tradeable goods.
When the incentives of workers favour burning buildings rather than working for wages, the next step is either to use force/control or to rebalance wages.
Another part of the issue, as I can see it, is that paying your workers better is a prisoners dilemma:
If nobody pays their workers well: All companies suffer from a disaffected, burnt out workforce that is unable to consistently perform at the best of their ability. As well as many industries suffering from the fact that their products are non-essential. If you're paycheck to paycheck, barely scraping by rent, you're not going to bother buying a new board game, pick up a book, get the latest and greatest console, or its overpriced games.
If some pay their workers well, and others don't, the companies that do will be at a disadvantage financially against their competitors. A healthier and happier employee almost certainly directly results in higher profits, but not to an extent that matches or outpaces the increase in wages required to reach that point.
If all of them pay their workers well, workers become less financially stressed. They do their job better, because they are healthier, less exhausted, etc. This also results in the exact opposite of the first case above: People have more money, they can spend more, you make more profit from people spending more across the board.
This is part of the reason that minimum wage laws are actually really important, and why the fact they have stagnated for so long is such an issue. It breaks the prisoners dilemma game by mandating that everyone together makes the group-optimal decision over the individual-optimal one.
Or, you know, we could also try UBI! Or help free up discretionary spending power by nationalizing the most essential goods and services (targeting the ones that are the least elastic). It's not like we aren't lacking in options that would work to alleviate the issue here.
You pay workers well and retain institutional knowledge it helps you 5+ years down the road. Who in 5+ years is going to run a study that shows retaining the people that created a system made it easier to maintain that system?
Like think about Jack Welch who ran GE into the ground but keep the stock afloat through financial craftsmanship. He spawns a ton of copy-cats because despite making poor decisions he was visibly successful for a long time.
It's not like the NFL where if you decide to fire all your receivers and play the running game you'll immediately start losing next week.
Wages are set by economic rules, things like supply and demand, not median house prices. That said, people who are getting a low wages might accept to be in a low-down economy such as today, however, as soon as the economy goes up, they're going to be looking to move. Thus, even when you can get by with hiring someone for a very low wage relative to what they could have made in previous years, it is often best to assume that the economy will get better and those people are going to want to move if you're only offering low wages. But if you offer a good wage, that means that those people, when the economy picks up, aren't going to be looking for a new job and so you can keep them instead of having to hire and train someone new when the economy picks up.
I don't know why median house prices are even factor at all in what you think you wage you a wage you accept would be. If you can't afford a house, that means you have to lower your standard of living. There are lots of people who live in less than median houses. That's part of the way averages and statistics work. If you don't like the median house prices, you may have to look at what's going on in your city that the house prices are so high. There are certainly issues in Silicon Valley that need to be addressed, but they are not issues of wages. They are other issues that they need to address. You are always welcome to live in a house that is lower than the median wage and that may be what is needed in order to afford something.
> I'll just be blunt: wages are also protection money. They're not just compensation for doing your job, they're compensation for not burning down warehouses, not going on strike, not sabotaging workloads, and not unionizing in the first place.
I'm interpreting this as venting, but the attitude on display here is madness. It is totally unreasonable to throw these sort of temper tantrums because an employer isn't adding crazy high wages to what is already a quite pleasant and comfortable desk job. One of the issues tech workers have is that even at a slightly lower wage than median it'd still be a much better deal than what an average worker is being offered.
People do far more work for far less money to a high professional standard. And trying to burn down a business because the person offering you the best deal you can find isn't what you imagine yourself to be worth is entitled to an undignified extent.
Author thinks that companies have infinite sums of money to pay any salary, but just don't want to do that.
He either worked for federal government for too long or just thinks world owns him something. Probably the latter, based on him being 4 months in unemployment and stating "Employment inquiries should check the TXT record on job.spacedino.net for contact info."
The 1830's reform of the UK, which begrudging wrestled power from the Lords and distributed voting power more evenly over the UK (rammed cities like Manchester had almost no voting rights), only happened when some of the Lords houses were close to being burned down.
Thankfully the UK didn't follow France into the anarchy that was the French Revolution, and Earl Grey could make them see reason. But damn did we come close.
The threat of violence that the worker wielded against their employer was indeed a good incentive to keep things amicable.
Nowadays, we don't know where the Lords necessarily live, the size of the Lords private armies don't need to be more than a handful of security guards, and AI/Robotics is diminishing the need for that handful of guards at all.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reform_Act_1832
For those unfamiliar - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_Revolution . Which from the UK's PoV had lead to a hellishly long, expensive, bloody, and existential series of wars. Right on the UK's doorstep. The memories of which were very much living in 1832, to undermine the usual "can't happen here" motivated reasoning of the 1%.
And it took further horrors, including the Great Famine in Ireland, to get the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corn_laws repealed in 1846. Which, arguably, was a far greater reform - destroying the economic foundations of most of the wealthy land owners, and greatly reducing how many poor folks lived on the brink of "if you can't afford the food prices..." starvation.
ADDED:
> Nowadays, we don't know where the Lords necessarily live, the size of the Lords private armies don't...
Sadly, it's far more complex than that. While amoral billionaires and mega-corps get the headlines, late-stage capitalism has very efficiently allocated nice-sounding slivers of its loot to a huge number of minor stakeholders. Pretty much everyone who has savings (for retirement or whatever) invested in equities. Pretty much every homeowner. And pretty much everyone who still believes that they'll somehow manage to break into those "just sit there and watch your wealth grow" classes.
Ultimately, businesses offer poor compensation because they can get away with it and society has designed the economic model to support this. The economic model does not reward work, but rather ownership of assets, and this principle exists throughout every nation. It's a society modelled around protectionism of wealth, where the wealthy can hand wealth down to their children.
In the United Kingdom, a third of people claiming government assistance are in employment. Over 50% of those buying their first home get gifted money from their parents to do so. Starting from nothing means playing a rigged game. It's like playing Monopoly, where one player starts out with half of the cards and everyone else thinks they can win if they strategise well enough.
Many core economic theories that are taught about productivity and pay are wrong. Anyone living in the real world can see that marginal productivity and price theory are wrong. If the game was perfectly fair, these theories may have some weight, however there's a multitude of factors that skew the board. Poor compensation does have consequences, and they may be felt by individual businesses. However, by and large, these consequences are offloaded on to the rest of society.
One correction: if no more value can be produced organically, this doesn’t mean that society will stale and money is hoarded among a few families.
Rather, the powerful will turn on each other and start waging war eventually, and the expendable bodies used in that is everyone else.
Neither of you mention creativity. The article too gives the impression that the world is made out of work (like turning a treadmill), and assets (inherently unfair). The point of it all is apparently to live, like a sessile sponge in the ocean, hence "living wage".
> Now at some point, the humans involved in handing out currency decided that too many people were living too nicely.
The origins of currency are mysterious. There were certainly some number of kings and tribal chiefs who minted coins and handed them out, mostly I think to soldiers. There were also traders using whatever coins and other small valuable objects. But I don't think anybody decided anything, except when messing around with taxes. I suppose company scrip comes closest to this vision, where your lack of money is determined by the mastermind who also creates it and hands it out and decides everybody's roles. That or communism. Generally no, it's not a rigged game, it's a messy brawl.
The core foundation of society is built around work. We trade our time, skills and attention for a pay check that allows us to sustain ourselves, our families, and that we can use as a means to achieve our goals. The key problem is that society devalues this work year after year, as those with assets are rewarded simply for holding a legal deed. Creativity can get you far when you have nothing, but there is a limit as to what it can achieve.
I disagree with the commenter that your replied to directly, who seems to believe the world is a zero-sum game. However it's also naive to believe that the game is not rigged, and that those who complain simply lack creativity.
In a healthy society, choosing to work to serve others 40 hours a week, should afford you the ability to acquire enough capital to buy a small house and start a family after 10 years. Unfortunately, this is now unachievable in many parts of the world.
The core theories aren’t necessarily wrong, I would say they are misapplied and misused to justify political stances. The science of economics does attempt to take in account as many factors as possible but that’s not the versions of the theories you will see discussed outside of the academic world because that becomes really complexe quickly and doesn’t paint a clear picture when we are looking for simple decisions. Just, don’t throw the baby, yada yada
Find a review of Dan Davies' The Unaccountability Machine and see what you think. I think that short term shareholder value may not be a good control variable given the state of the systems we navigate.
The core theories of economics seem correct, and in fact predict the current situation if used correctly. The problem is that the game has been systemicaly rigged. Employers have maximimized their legal leverage, while crushing all employee and subcontractor leverage. The central banks favors (and often rigs) the metrics that favor the rich (GDP, U3, CPI, etc), and ignore alteratives that favor labour. The government designs tax policy to favor integenerational wealth, and capital accumulation over income.
The new deal in America roughly got things correct, and was followed by the greatest expansion of the middle class in history. What we're suffering from today is the systematic destruction of that social contract.
[dead]
This comes off as slightly on the entitled side. Yearly salaries at $100k+ is very high by Western European standards. I can only imagine what our Eastern European colleagues would feel about it. If you can live a comfortable life and send our children to school well fed perhaps broaden the horizons a bit before ranting off about how much better the world would be if you could be paid a bit more.
Context suggests he’s in the US so not sure that sort of cross jurisdiction comparison is useful.
You could just as easily say Europeans are entitled because their salaries are high compared to an Ethiopian. It’s not a useful comparison
The point was that a $100k+ compensation for a software office work is among the highest in the world. If a comparison with another high compensation area falls flat, then maybe that says something.
Perhaps another US state would have been a better comparison. It might be hard for a software developer in Montana to identify with a Silicon Valley rant about salaries being too low.
It would not cross my mind personally to complain about low compensation for my skilled work, precisely because I know my collegaues from areas with lower compensation are just as skilled and earn less. In what way would the world be better off if I was better paid? If it helped my company increase their security posture then that would say more about the ineffective ways we organize work around here than anything else.
Great, I know people in Africa live on less than a dollar a day. How soon can you start working for me? I don't follow minimum wage or overtime laws, you're a gig worker
It may be high, but so is cost of living; a better way is to compare spending power.
There is no reasonable metric by which one can claim US software devs are hard up I think is the point being made.
Everyone would like to make more but I was interpreting this thread as suggesting a us dev whining that as a field they’re being mistreated comes off a bit gauche
In the Netherlands many senior SWEs make €85K+ at the moment and that is what $100k+ is right now.
I'm writing this because I don't consider NL to be the top country in Europe where you can make a lot of money being a SWE. And I'm not talkin about FAANG salaries either, they are higher here.
The pressures he describes seem correct and mirror what I’ve seen.
Think he’s wrong about this being close to blowing up. Think that’s coloured by his own personal situation. I suspect unfortunately the powers that be correctly read the situation as significantly more room to squeeze.
It might read as bad to usa ears but keep in mind there are people breaking down ships with zero safety, zero job security, low pay, bad equipment and certain heath impact etc. People will bear crazy stuff and still show up to work
> People will bear crazy stuff and still show up to work
Because the "in the real world" alternative is so much worse. In theory: "Workers unite!", in practice: "Lose your home".
If we continue down this trajectory, where work pays less each consecutive year, soon the majority will not have a home to lose.
Yeah then it would be mouths to feed, there is always a greater crisis than the one you are facing. And this is the entire reason folks are willing to work for peanuts, I have worked for 1$ an hr, and 100$ an hr. Sure I was less skilled but I wasn't 100x less skilled.
The difference is my desperation for the job. I had to pay for my studies back when 1$ an hour seemed like more than nothing.
Now working for less than 50$ feels like being exploited. This is the matter of perspective and situation in life, you can never fix it for everyone in the world. There will always will be people like me who will work for 1$ an hour because they have needs to meet and scholarships or handouts don't make up for it all.
In ancient times, slaves didn't revolt because they were oppressed by weapons and violence. Instead of paying workers, resources were used to pay and feed the military. Slaves were considered "war bounty" and tradeable goods.
When the incentives of workers favour burning buildings rather than working for wages, the next step is either to use force/control or to rebalance wages.
It is not "in ancient times"
This is a product of a resource rich economy, you can see it today.
It is calles Dutch disease
Another part of the issue, as I can see it, is that paying your workers better is a prisoners dilemma:
If nobody pays their workers well: All companies suffer from a disaffected, burnt out workforce that is unable to consistently perform at the best of their ability. As well as many industries suffering from the fact that their products are non-essential. If you're paycheck to paycheck, barely scraping by rent, you're not going to bother buying a new board game, pick up a book, get the latest and greatest console, or its overpriced games.
If some pay their workers well, and others don't, the companies that do will be at a disadvantage financially against their competitors. A healthier and happier employee almost certainly directly results in higher profits, but not to an extent that matches or outpaces the increase in wages required to reach that point.
If all of them pay their workers well, workers become less financially stressed. They do their job better, because they are healthier, less exhausted, etc. This also results in the exact opposite of the first case above: People have more money, they can spend more, you make more profit from people spending more across the board.
This is part of the reason that minimum wage laws are actually really important, and why the fact they have stagnated for so long is such an issue. It breaks the prisoners dilemma game by mandating that everyone together makes the group-optimal decision over the individual-optimal one.
Or, you know, we could also try UBI! Or help free up discretionary spending power by nationalizing the most essential goods and services (targeting the ones that are the least elastic). It's not like we aren't lacking in options that would work to alleviate the issue here.
I think the larger issue is the delayed ROI.
You pay workers well and retain institutional knowledge it helps you 5+ years down the road. Who in 5+ years is going to run a study that shows retaining the people that created a system made it easier to maintain that system?
Like think about Jack Welch who ran GE into the ground but keep the stock afloat through financial craftsmanship. He spawns a ton of copy-cats because despite making poor decisions he was visibly successful for a long time.
It's not like the NFL where if you decide to fire all your receivers and play the running game you'll immediately start losing next week.
Wages are set by economic rules, things like supply and demand, not median house prices. That said, people who are getting a low wages might accept to be in a low-down economy such as today, however, as soon as the economy goes up, they're going to be looking to move. Thus, even when you can get by with hiring someone for a very low wage relative to what they could have made in previous years, it is often best to assume that the economy will get better and those people are going to want to move if you're only offering low wages. But if you offer a good wage, that means that those people, when the economy picks up, aren't going to be looking for a new job and so you can keep them instead of having to hire and train someone new when the economy picks up.
I don't know why median house prices are even factor at all in what you think you wage you a wage you accept would be. If you can't afford a house, that means you have to lower your standard of living. There are lots of people who live in less than median houses. That's part of the way averages and statistics work. If you don't like the median house prices, you may have to look at what's going on in your city that the house prices are so high. There are certainly issues in Silicon Valley that need to be addressed, but they are not issues of wages. They are other issues that they need to address. You are always welcome to live in a house that is lower than the median wage and that may be what is needed in order to afford something.
> I'll just be blunt: wages are also protection money. They're not just compensation for doing your job, they're compensation for not burning down warehouses, not going on strike, not sabotaging workloads, and not unionizing in the first place.
I'm interpreting this as venting, but the attitude on display here is madness. It is totally unreasonable to throw these sort of temper tantrums because an employer isn't adding crazy high wages to what is already a quite pleasant and comfortable desk job. One of the issues tech workers have is that even at a slightly lower wage than median it'd still be a much better deal than what an average worker is being offered.
People do far more work for far less money to a high professional standard. And trying to burn down a business because the person offering you the best deal you can find isn't what you imagine yourself to be worth is entitled to an undignified extent.
Don't care, stocks are up
Signed, Anyone who you'd like to care
Hold on you can't be throwing around such perversely high numbers like 81,680$ for your European readers.
Today is international workers day and we are sharing a capuccino with my colleague.
Author thinks that companies have infinite sums of money to pay any salary, but just don't want to do that.
He either worked for federal government for too long or just thinks world owns him something. Probably the latter, based on him being 4 months in unemployment and stating "Employment inquiries should check the TXT record on job.spacedino.net for contact info."