Only people who don't understand that wages come from the value a person produces. Lawyers, doctors, professional athletes, also get high wages and are entitled to them. If you want to adjust income inequality you have to do it across the board, through taxation, not by shaming individual industries.
We get paid so much because we produce that much value. But if these allegations are true, we aren't getting paid enough.
So... what do you think about the salaries of teachers in public schools?
Also, I bet bank & oil execs believe they make the world-go-round and add a lot of value too. After all, banks & oil touches pretty much all our lives as much as computers do, right?
Paying teachers more won't magically make them better teachers. I have been told by experts that there is strong evidence that better teachers achieve better results for students. From this it follows that if there were a way to identify potentially good teachers, it would make sense to attract these people by offering higher salaries.
But that would involve hiring different people (who would probably demand higher salaries), not paying existing teachers more.
The fact is that some people are more valuable than others. Not in an existential sense, but in the sense of how much their labor is worth the market.
Senior management are a special case. I think many of them are people with exceptional ability, but it is harder to argue that their wages are "market wages" because they tend to determine their own salaries. There are many market frictions that are particular to the shareholder-manager relationship. These might potentially allow senior management to extract "economic rent" i.e. wages that are beyond the value they produce.
> So... what do you think about the salaries of teachers in public schools?
Well, it varies by region. There are some areas where teachers get $1,000/day compensation packages. But they don't really earn that money, they just use state violence to take it from people who earned it.
yeah it's hard to find examples of high wage workers who aren't in some sense unionized. Not really sure what your point is though. After all, if their wages are in part due to being part of a cartel, then tech workers who earn that wage without a cartel are even more deserving of it.
Ok, first you write that "wages come from the value a person produces."
Then you write "it's hard to find examples of high wage workers who aren't in some sense unionized."
And then you again add something completely contradictory.
But I do agree with you. I would say that tech workers are underpaid. Google has revenue per employee of $931,565. Most of that is profit. Is the average compensation per Googler anywhere near that?
Why shouldn't Googlers form a union and take lets say an average $500,000 per employee? Right now, Googlers get paid free-market wages that are a fraction of the value they add to the company.
There is no contradiction, but I may make different simplifying assumptions in different contexts. At first, I was replying to a person who claimed that even the free market wage for programmers was excessive. In that context I was ignoring market power on both sides, and assuming a perfect free market.
When you brought up unions, I pointed out that since tech workers have less market power than doctors and lawyers, they are actually underpaid relative to these groups.
To clarify: I think that doctors and lawyers would still be highly paid if they had no market power, because their skills/abilities are valuable.
So my point of view is that market wages are in accordance to the value that people produce, but people can sometimes obtain more by having market power (or less, if the employers have market power). It seems that you think higher wages only come from market power.
On a union for Googlers, what would stop someone else from joining Google and not joining the union, in exchange for better pay/conditions in the short term.
We get paid so much because we produce that much value. But if these allegations are true, we aren't getting paid enough.