Interesting Links for 8-6-2011

[andrewducker]

• Why You Can’t Get My Book in [Insert Country Here] (Scalzi on regionalisation)
  (tags: books publishing)
• Women warriors show psychological resilience similar to men
  (tags: psychology trauma military war gender)
• Frankenstein Superstar - a rather spiffy webcomic. Not suitable for reading in work, but well worth reading at home.
  (tags: frankenstein webcomic comic funny)
• A warning to Scottish separatists. If you're not careful you'll end up like Norway!
  (tags: norway scotland independence)
• Dr Who renewed for another 14 episodes with Matt Smith.
  (tags: DrWho StevenMoffat)
• Samsung Delivers Galaxy S II to CyanogenMod Dev, Says Get to Work
  (tags: android samsung opensource awesome)
• Russian President Proposes Creative Commons-Style Rules Baked Directly Into Copyright
  (tags: copyright russia)
• Jilted ex-boyfriend puts up abortion billboard.
  (tags: privacy freespeech abortion)
• Okay. Now I want a pirate cinema. Arrrrr!
  (tags: cinema design awesome)
• 12 Unusual and Creative Home Theaters. I want the Batman one.
  (tags: design movies awesome)

Comments

[0olong.livejournal.com]

It is true that some people bring in ten times as much money as other people. I'd say the questions to ask are (a) Does that mean they should be getting paid ten times as much? If so, why? and (b) What is the relationship between 'money brought in' and 'value produced' here? It's not obvious that the two can be equated, or that anybody can produce ten times as much value as a skilled teacher.

[andrewducker]

It's a question of how much it costs to hire a person. If there are only a tiny number of people who can do X, then companies are effectively bidding for them. If everyone can do it then there's no incentive to pay high amounts.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

Yes. But more specifically, it's a question of how many people there are who will do X for Y money. So for instance, I doubt Ben & Jerry's would have had such trouble with their income-multiplier policy if they'd been based in Japan, where from what I can gather, nobody expects to be paid a thousand times as much as their employees. Or towards the other end of the scale, it's not as if there's a mad surplus of qualified nurses, but they all expect to be paid quite badly, so they are.

[andrewducker]

Japan does have low income inequality - it seems to be ingrained into their culture. In fact, checking Wikipedia they have the lowest income inequality in the world. How they manage that, I don't know. Japan's culture is very different to most other countries though, and I'm not sure I'd want to live somewhere more like that.

The problem nurses have is that there is no market for them - the NHS has centralised pay, so it doesn't vary from place to place (which causes all sorts of other problems, as costs of living vary dramatically across the country). Of course nurses aren't paid terribly (any kind of specialist, midwife, health visitor, etc. is on at least £30k) - but you can't really move from one place to another to do the same job for more pay.

[0olong.livejournal.com]

Yes, there's a lot that we might be happier without in Japanese culture - but the point stands that pay is fairly clearly largely a cultural thing, not a pure economic thing. That is, it's allocated through the game of economics, but the parameters of that game are cultural as much as they're numerical.

And I'd like to see a culture of saying 'fuck you' to people who won't do their jobs unless they're paid hundreds of times - (or even just dozens) as much as other people. I think the knock-on effects on society of having some people being that rich are deeply negative, and even if we're not agreeing to tax them for 90% of their income or whatever, I don't think it's right at all to say 'their money, their business'... and that starts to seem like a no-brainer when the state ends up bailing out companies at least partly because they have been funnelling so much of their income into the hands of a few individuals.

[andrewducker]

I do, actually, agree with bits of this. I do wonder if we only get some people making that much money in certain industries, and that most of those industries are bad things to have so much of

I suspect that we'd need much more controls over a larger area to make it work - and it would have more of an impact than people would like.

[eatsoylentgreen.livejournal.com]

well yes, few people can drive a golf ball like Tiger Woods, but is that really so important? Like millions of dollars important?

[eatsoylentgreen.livejournal.com]

but what does that mean, they bring in ten times as much money? Economics tells us that a price is just a collective opinion, that the price setting people claim that its worth that much.

Imagine a job field, say programming. Now some programmers are much more productive, this is true, some people can produce good code almost as fast as they can type. And some people produce a lot less junk in their code.

Ten times as much good code though? I think that's a stretch. Can you think of any programmer that would have to be replaced by ten other people?

And most jobs can't be analyzed as easily as programming. But there's almost no people that are 10 times as valuable as their coworkers, are there?

Plus, I seriously doubt that those programmers are getting paid much more than their lumpish coworkers. Performance isn't paid for, at least not here in the United States of Liars and Bootyshakers.

[andrewducker]

There are coders that are worth 10x as much - but not many of them (and AFAIK that's born out by the fact that there are few coders that are paid more than £100k in salaried positions).

Most of the ones that are worth that much are worth a lot because they have domain knowledge, are maths geniuses, or something similar. They're the people that write languages for fun, or can produce incredibly complex models of things that are useful to people with lots of cash.

Google, MS, etc. pay a lot more than the average - but they demand the smartest people.