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Originally Posted by sebastian_dangerfield
Except that's not what happens. The debate about whether increased minimum wages lift all boats is nowhere near resolved.
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I thought you were proposing something more profound that raising the minimum wage, but I guess neither of us really know what you're proposing. My assumption is that spreading money around more equitably would be better for everyone, in the aggregate, and if you disagree with that then I'm not sure why you think it's a good idea.
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I don't scoff at strategy. I'm merely suggesting that sort of skill, which I don't think anyone has found terribly mentally taxing (YMMV depending on industry*) is overvalued. But that's just one of loads of skills that enjoy unwarranted premiums do to lack of information among the public. If a laymen knew the ease with which all sorts of professional jobs can be performed, the value of endless types of professionals and managers would fall radically overnight.
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That would make sense if professionals and managers were hired by laymen with no familiarity with their jobs, but it turns out that's not how the world works.
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We profit from, I believe the term is, "informational asymmetries." A discussion that introduces intrinsic value, which is nothing but a focus on the basic value of something before the exchange value is established, would help to lower our exchange value.
A really amusing way of effecting a correction would be for someone on a big network to put out a primetime ten part series, taking ten overpaid-for jobs, and analyzing each, with whistle-blowers making admissions about what the jobs really involve. Call it, "What Your [Insert Job] Really Does."
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In my job, the information assymmetry is that I know stuff about the law and compliance, and my colleagues don't. So they pay me to help them understand what they need to do. This seems to create value. Not clear why you think it needs correction.
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I think the multiplier between the highest paid job and the lowest paid job would begin to revert to something like we saw in the 50s, when there was a more corporate, as opposed to deal-obsessed, economy.
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If you're focussed on the highest-paid jobs, then try a corporate governance fix.
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It's simple. Introduce an intrinsic value into the debate and let behavioral economics do the rest. Capital is always looking for cost savings, and it hates labor costs most, at all tiers. If we give it the intellectual underpinning to more aggressively cut middle to upper management and professional service wages, and the political cover of doing so to facilitate more pay to lower end workers, the arguments will get traction.
We already have a form of intrinsic valuation of labor: Minimum wage. That's a baseline value assigned to an hour of labor, regardless of what exchange value would dictate. In a socialist or communist system, one could assign all sorts of intrinsic values to different types of work. But again, we needn't do that. All we need to do is start the conversation about intrinsic valuation here and let it become an academic scaffolding for the argument that management and professionals are overpaid. Market forces would do the rest. (It would work hand in hand with tech, which is already doing this in a different manner.)
The argument that the upper middle class is actually stealing the most from the economy and keeping the poor poor, rather than the 1%, is quietly gaining traction already. We've all seen articles about that, and there's some truth to it.
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1. Introduce an intrinsic value into the debate
2. ??????
3. Social justice and peace on Earth
Sounds so crazy it just might work.
I'm sure you could, and they would be equally unresponsive to what I said, which was, "One can think that CEO pay is out of whack (and identify specific reasons for that) without thinking that everyone's pay across the whole economy is out of whack and needs to be replaced with a number that you made up."
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I think you're in the limo, humming along with the rest of us to Phil Ochs.
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Ms Slothrop did the driving this am, but there's certainly no limo.
