Comment by embedding-shape
12 hours ago
> some people will be paid more for a job that takes intelligence or years of study.
Sadly, it seems so, even if the effects of the jobs on daily life differ a great deal sometimes. The world would succumb faster if we had no garbage collectors, yet they get less pay than a programmer who the world could easily survive without? Makes no sense to me.
The basic services that keep us alive (e.g. farmers producing our food) tend to also be "easy" (it is physically demanding, but doesn't require years of study to start and you quickly learn by doing). This also means that the vast majority of people would be able to do this kind of jobs. Our economy pays more for scarcity, i.e. jobs that are in demand and at the same time require more qualification, so that the number of people needed in that position tends to be less than the current amount. Both views have sense, they just start from two different points.
"The basic services that keep us alive (e.g. farmers producing our food) tend to also be "easy""
The reason you think that is that you know nothing about agriculture. But it isn't true. Right now, farmers in the US grow about 5x as much food per acre as farmers in other countries. If you were in charge of farming in the US, that surplus would likely disappear in a single season. You would also likely damage the soil which would make cleaning up after you take 4-6 years.
Everyone thinks things they know nothing about are easy. But they rarely are.
PS This is why I never tell people I'm a programmer. I don't want to be associated with people who think like you.
From having worked with farmers, the actual logistics of running a farm are very complex. Farming's no longer an easy job because the demand for productivity means you have to harness a whole stable of technologies and understand to some degree advanced finances, floral biology, geotechnics, and meteorology. And yet farmers still get paid little relative to the breadth of knowledge and skills required for running a farm. It's just that farming is still considered a blue-collar job because it was the domain of the poorest for millenia, where as software engineering in any form is relatively new and thus specialized and so considered white-collar.
You're right, running now a farm that is profitable and can stay on the market is very different from doing so 200 years ago. But knowledge is just one aspect. The other aspect I mentioned is having less people in the field than what the market asks for. In the specific case of farmers, I think that modern farms are so much more efficient that we need way less than before, even if the world's population grew. So, while there's a gap between the knowledge required and the earnings, I think this can be explained by farms having a much greater output now, and so the market doesn't ask for more farms than what we have. This could be false at a global scale, but I think it is true at a country-level scale in most of the developed countries. Hence why farmers aren't paid much in those countries.
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We would all die in a week if we went without water, yet water is cheaper per gallon than gasoline or printer ink or perfume. It’s a question of scarcity and supply curves. Water, even clean water, is not particularly scarce if you leverage industrial systems to purify it. Other products require much more complicated supply chains and are produced at a much smaller scale than water, which makes them more rarer and more expensive.
The skills necessary to develop efficient and effective software are much more scarce than those needed to remove trash, or pick crops, or provide elder care. That’s why the former is paid so much more.
You're explaining how things are but the parent is indicating that's not how things should be.
He's not describing how but why. And at a fundamental level it's something that can't be overcome. If you can only have 10 of one thing, yet can have 5000 of another, and both have even remotely comparable levels of demand/necessity/etc, then the 10 is always going to end up much more valued.
Even take some sort of idealized anarcho-communal society. Imagine two people have a dispute and threaten to leave over it. One's a highly skilled doctor, and the other's a garbage collector. Our equal society's going to suddenly become just as unequal as any other simply because the doctor leaving would have a much greater negative effect than the garbage collector. And that reality would permeate in the day-to-day happenings, creating classes even in an idealized classless society.
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Maybe no garbage collection is the back pressure missing from the voracious consumption machine.