
New Report/Dataset: Just 10% of Workers Receive Nearly Half of Global Pay - infodocket
https://www.ilo.org/global/about-the-ilo/newsroom/news/WCMS_712234/lang--en/index.htm
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IdontRememberIt
Yeah, and these UN guys are on the top of the unecessary overpaid people.

I live where they all live in Geneva. Their kids go in the top private
schools, they fly business, their wifes drive luxury suvs, they do not pay
taxes... But most of them employ illegal nannies and cleaning ladies, etc.

So preaching what they never do at home makes them not really liked by locals.

BTW, did you know that interns were working for free? (It is a taboo).
[https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/unpaid-labour_geneva-interns-
ta...](https://www.swissinfo.ch/eng/unpaid-labour_geneva-interns-take-part-in-
global-protest/42969242)

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eloff
Or phrased another way, 10% of employees deliver 50% of the value. If you use
pay as a (very) rough proxy for value. When phrased that way it seems
conservative. Of course 10% of the people deliver half the value, I would have
pegged it more like 10% deliver 80% of the value. And maybe it is more that
way, because pay doesn't scale with value in most careers. CEOs being one of
the few exceptions - and the value often dubious.

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djrobstep
This is incredibly circular.

"The reason these people are highly paid is because they deliver value." "But
what is value?" "Why it's what people get paid of course!"

In reality, pay isn't at all a proxy for anything humans actually value.

If it was, nurses and teachers would be extremely highly paid, while
advertising executives and sharepoint consultants would be paid less than
zero.

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shoo
i agree that it is necessary to clearly separate "value delivered" from "value
extracted".

but i think you also need to talk about "value for who?" Who gains?. Who
loses?

e.g. advertising executives can deliver a large amount of value to the owners
of companies by helping those companies generate demand and increase sales.
But perhaps at the same time they create or destroy value for the people on
the receiving end of the advertising (in the best case, discovering a product
or service that genuinely helps them, in the worst case, tricking them into
consuming a product or service that is harmful). There is probably also value
destruction, spread in small amounts over large populations and large
timescales, in terms of the opportunity cost of committing resources to
producing whatever product or service was sold, instead of doing something
else with those resources that would benefit a larger group of people, or a
future group of people who don't exist yet.

e.g. "i helped my mate Frank deliver a large amount of value by driving the
getaway car after Frank robbed the bank". Frank has a business that generates
value for himself. I helped Frank deliver that value from the bank to himself.
Frank gives me a cut of the value. It is possible that we also may generate
value for various other stakeholders by improving the velocity of currency
throughout the local economy.

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zxcvvcxz
Of course, human achievement is full of Pareto distributions.

Same with mating - a small percentage of say 10% of men mate with half the
women or so. Throughout history you have twice as many female ancestors as
Male ancestors. Success accumulates at the top.

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eloff
The mating thing is no longer true. Unless you define it as offspring, but
those are hardly successful men in financial terms. If you define it as dating
or sex it's true. But most men marry - a relatively recent thing in human
society.

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hdpq
Global pay ... in the US, if you earn minimum wage, you're in the top 1%.

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sokoloff
> in the US, if you earn minimum wage, you're in the top 1%.

The US has well over 1% of the global workforce, so it's mathematically
impossible for the lowest paid US worker to be in the top 1% of wages and the
least wealthy full time US worker to be in the top 1% of wealth.

