Comment by throw10920

> Sure, but increasing that sample size would require doing more than just paying them more.

Citation needed, because...

> IE it's not particularly useful to say "we will pay 1 million billion dollars to anyone in the united states who wishes to be an air traffic controller" if you want good air traffic controllers.

...if you're asserting that offering one quadrillion dollars as the salary for ATCs would not decisively solve the problem, that's insane and there can't be further discussion.

However, if your point is that this might be true, but the statement isn't useful, that's false too - it is useful to say this, because if true, then it means that there some function that describes the relationship between compensation and qualified applicants. And now that we've agreed that there is a function, we can then have a reasonable discussion about the inputs, and specifically the tradeoff between making the compensation higher vs. changing the way the training is structured and the artificial constraints on supply.

If you can say "to increase trained ATCs by 50% you can either make the salary $450k higher for 1k employees, or you can do a tech modernization that will cost $10M and keep your tech recent for the next decade" and provide a specific tradeoff between financial compensation vs non-salary factors, then you'll be able to have a logical argument about the two. And if the numbers are as skewed as in my example, you'll be able to convince the majority of logical people that increasing the salary is the suboptimal strategy.