I have a degree in both CS (making things) and Philosophy (making things up) and I completely agree with patio11's comment. Progressivism has nothing to do with it. Majoring in Art History (where there are 12 job openings a year) and then getting a job as a barista at the local coffee shop doesn't make you the bastion of progressivism.
There are more valuable things to life than money. I challenge this reactionary view that the worth of a person's contribution to society can be measured by their salary. If a person chooses to enrich humanity's lot by providing value outside of the marketplace, it is the responsibility of society to support them. By refusing to do so, we all become poorer.
Moreover, I note a trend in the fields of study that are being praised: they are all dominated by men. We praise male fields and dismiss female fields. I wonder if this doesn't reflect some deeper, troubling biases of our culture.
"I challenge this reactionary view that the worth of a person's contribution to society can be measured by their salary."
Nobody said that.
"If a person chooses to enrich humanity's lot by providing value outside of the marketplace, it is the responsibility of society to support them."
I agree, as long as you're not forcing people to support them via taxation.
"We praise male fields and dismiss female fields. I wonder if this doesn't reflect some deeper, troubling biases of our culture."
Women are traditionally less responsible for earning a household's income. Few people dismiss a woman as a mate because she makes too little money. This reduces the incentive to enter a high-earning career.
I challenge this reactionary view that the worth of a person's contribution to society can be measured by their salary.
If their contribution is greater, then why isn't somebody willing to pay them more? If there was such a trove of hidden value, you would think that some greedy capitalist would snap it up and exploit it.
If a person chooses to enrich humanity's lot by providing value outside of the marketplace, it is the responsibility of society to support them.
This isn't a question of differing philosophies and values. This is just objectively wrong. In the degenerate case, if we all decide to become poets, then who is going to farm the food to feed us all? This should clue you in to the fallacy of your statement above. The marginal value of an additional poet is lower than the marginal value of another farmer, or another assembly line worker, or another programmer.
Moreover, there is no such thing as "outside the marketplace". There is more to the market then just financial transactions. Everything we do: how we elect to use our time, the care we invest in a relationship, everything, is a decision about how we use our limited resources (time and attention in my two examples, but the potential list covers literally everything). And we necessarily make those decisions by weighing what we expect their costs to be versus what we expect to derive from them. And that is what the study of economics is about -- money is only the smallest part of it.
I note a trend in the fields of study that are being praised: they are all dominated by men. We praise male fields...
Holy mackerel, what a mouthful. You've got to be trolling, but I'll bite anyway.
Let's start with the fact that YOU are the one that's characterizing things as "male" or "female"; I don't see anyone else doing so. Of the three cubicles bordering on mine, two of them are occupied by females; shall I call software development a "female" field? If not, then why would I ever praise it?
But your statement is its own dis-proof. You (and the rest of the "progressives") are praising what you label "female fields", and implicitly condemning the "male" ones. Doesn't this show a priori that we don't universally favor one or the other, but rather have, as a society, a diverse set of opinions?
Finally, I'd like to retell an old joke from my (engineering) college:
Scientists learn to ask "why does that work?". Engineers are taught to ask "how does that work?". Accountants learn to ask "how much will it cost?". Liberal arts majors are trained to ask "do you want fries with that?"
If their contribution is greater, then why isn't somebody willing to pay them more? If there was such a trove of hidden value, you would think that some greedy capitalist would snap it up and exploit it.
You should ask a postdoc making ~30k a year to do cutting edge science the same question. They could triple that tending bar.
There's no mystery here, I already gave the answer in my previous post. Quoting myself:
there is no such thing as "outside the marketplace". There is more to the market then just financial transactions. Everything we do: how we elect to use our time, the care we invest in a relationship, everything, is a decision about how we use our limited resources (time and attention in my two examples, but the potential list covers literally everything). And we necessarily make those decisions by weighing what we expect their costs to be versus what we expect to derive from them. And that is what the study of economics is about -- money is only the smallest part of it.
Those postdocs derive greater satisfaction from doing their science than they would by tending bar. In their own internal calculus, the rewards of their career are greater than the simple money equation.
Progressives like to think they're being deep and insightful when they observe that there's more to the world than just money. But it's not news to anyone, least of all to economists. This is embodied in the concept of utility. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Utility :
Utility is usually applied by economists in such constructs as the indifference curve, which plot the combination of commodities that an individual or a society would accept to maintain a given level of satisfaction. ... [Quoting Paul Samuelson] "Utility is taken to be correlative to Desire or Want. It has been already argued that desires cannot be measured directly, but only indirectly, by the outward phenomena to which they give rise: and that in those cases with which economics is chiefly concerned the measure is found in the price which a person is willing to pay for the fulfilment or satisfaction of his desire."
Thus, in the case of your hypothetical postdoc, the opportunity to do his (or her) science is worth $60K. (I oversimplify due to things like marginal utility, but that's the gist)
Good job regurgitating micro econ 101. /sarcasm off/ In all seriousness trying to discuss utility of a general group of people (or even a specific person) is doomed to failure. Utility is a nice round theoretical construct for trying to talk about why consumers make the decisions they do.
However, there is a lot of evidence to show consumers do not make entirely rational choices. Even if they did, trying to determine a utility function for a consumer would still fail. For instance, can you even with certainty determine your own utility function. I know I can't.
Now lets pretend a consumer does in fact only make rational choices, and their utility function for every conceivable situation is known. I have distinct, although unproven, suspicion that determining what choices the person would make through their day would be NP-complete as their present choices would effect their future choices. Thus all possible outcomes would have to be considered far into the future if one truly wanted to maximize utility.
Therefore, assuming what I have just said is fairly logical, it is impossible for a rational consumer to exist even if their utility function is known, since it would be impossible to for them to compute any given choice in a finite amount of time.
In conclusion any discussion that touches on "utility" or assuming a group of people is making "rational" choices is doomed to failure. The truth is we don't know why any given person make any given choice.
Also you seem to ignore the important of positive externalities in your arguments. I believe this is where you disagree with other posters.
there is a lot of evidence to show consumers do not make entirely rational choices. Even if they did, trying to determine a utility function for a consumer would still fail. For instance, can you even with certainty determine your own utility function.
Of course; I never claimed otherwise. It's certainly true that any person's utility function is at least partly unknown to them, and in any case changes over time. As a result it has little value as a predictive tool. But that doesn't mean that it doesn't exist. Ludwig von Mises attacks this head-on in Human Action (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_Action ).
It's undeniable that at any juncture, the action that a person takes is based on some judgment, conscious or not (and quite possibly mistaken), that the chosen action delivers a greater utility than its alternatives.
Thus, the hypothetical postdoc-cum-bartender is deciding -- for reasons that we don't know, but real all the same -- that he would prefer to do his research over bartending, even to the extent of giving up $60K to do so.
Who are we to second guess his decision? Precisely because, and not in spite of, the fact that his reasons are inscrutable, we can only assume that he's making the best call he can. By what right can we override it? And more to the point, if his/her university is providing such a valuable career for him, who are we to say that they must sweeten the pot and throw in even more money?
You're changing the subject. We aren't talking about the artist's or scientist's satisfaction, but whether the amount of money they make reflects their usefulness to society.
Would you argue that a scientist is less important than a bar tender based on their incomes?
I must admit that I was careless in my terminology. When I said salary, I should have said total compensation. That, of course, covers the money he's paid, but also benefits (healthcare, pension, etc.), stability, satisfaction from a stimulating job, respect, and if he's lucky, perhaps the feeling that Feynman describes when he'd discovered something new and was for a short time the only human who has ever held that piece of knowledge.
But you're being a little careless, too, when you throw around a word like "important". Can you be more specific?
If their contribution is greater, then why isn't somebody willing to pay them more? If there was such a trove of hidden value, you would think that some greedy capitalist would snap it up and exploit it.
Hmm, sounds more like economics produces cases of local maxima, not absolute maxima...
If their contribution is greater, then why isn't somebody willing to pay them more? If there was such a trove of hidden value, you would think that some greedy capitalist would snap it up and exploit it.
Because a capitalist would prefer to pay nothing of course. Scientists like Einstein don't get rich while millions or even billions are made off the foundation of their discoveries.
> Because a capitalist would prefer to pay nothing of course.
Not true - all of the best businessmen I know quite like to pay people, and pay them well. A mentor of mine runs one of the most profitable architectural firms in the Middle East, he always talks to me about the difference between the "going rate" and "staying rate" - he prefers to pay 20% to 40% above market, sometimes double the market rate in salary and bonuses and he has an insanely high rentention rate in a competitive field. Whenever I had people contract or work for me, I either paid them considerably above market, or otherwise worked to get them ridiculously good compensation - I worked to get them good compensation by their own standards and goals, whether it was travel, training, getting to work on really really fucking cool projects most of the time so work didn't even feel like work... and so on. Short-sighted people like to screw people. Brilliant people like to compensate well.
> Scientists like Einstein don't get rich while millions or even billions are made off the foundation of their discoveries.
Einstein was probably a bad example to pick of that - his lifetime compensation was sky high. He didn't get as much as, say, J.P. Morgan, but he was loved and adored by a great many people, was a renowned and honored guest anywhere in the civilized world, and basically was able to live the quality of life of a multi-millionaire as he chose. It's like being President of the USA - Presidents don't make all that much money, but make incredibly high compensation overall.
Not true - all of the best businessmen I know quite like to pay people, and pay them well.
They do that because they are __required to__ in order to retain talent and competitiveness. If they could get it for free, you can bet they would. Why do you think so much outsourcing is happening?
And Einstein was not a bad example to pick out of that. His contributions possibly number in the trillions, yet his salary was quite low.
> They do that because they are __required to__ in order to retain talent and competitiveness. If they could get it for free, you can bet they would.
You'd be surprised - often it's more cost effective to pay people than to try to get them for free. You get a different quality of work, support, and dedication. Ever had an unpaid intern? They take up more time than they're worth. Free labor is very expensive...
> And Einstein was not a bad example to pick out of that. His contributions possibly number in the trillions, yet his salary was quite low.
Salary is a part of compensation, but not all of it. Again, the U.S. President makes something like $400,000 per year, but his total compensation including prestige, perks, fame, power, etc, etc is one of the highest in the USA. Salary is not the only form of compensation. Money/direct monetary benefits is not the only form of compensation. When you can eat anywhere for free, and stay in any hotel or palace as an honored guest for free, you don't really need so much money any more. Einstein was on that level for the latter half of his life.
You'd be surprised - often it's more cost effective to pay people than to try to get them for free. You get a different quality of work, support, and dedication. Ever had an unpaid intern?
Please reread my sentence which you've just completely ignored. Unpaid interns obviously don't have the talent that most people want. But despite that, people still want them!
When you can eat anywhere for free, and stay in any hotel or palace as an honored guest for free, you don't really need so much money any more. Einstein was on that level for the latter half of his life.
Einstein could do that, but with what stipulation? Most likely that he had to give a speech. He can't just go to a multiple month luxury resort free of obligations that any billion-air mogul can today. And again, what is the value of these free meals and visits that can only be offered to you first? I would peg that at around $20 million at most, which pales in comparison to the billion dollar industries that have resulted from his discoveries.
> "I challenge this reactionary view that the worth of a person's contribution to society can be measured by their salary."
Nobody here has suggested this.
> "If a person chooses to enrich humanity's lot by providing value outside of the marketplace, it is the responsibility of society to support them."
No, it is not. I respect historians and artists as much as I do programmers and engineers, but let's be realistic - there's nothing truly noble about any of the above endeavors. They are, in the end, self-serving interests.
I'm an engineer because I love building things. It makes me happy when I build stuff, and while I can rationalize and self-aggrandize by thinking about my "contributions" to humanity, the reality is that I do this because I want to. There has been no great sacrifice involved, and I would hardly think society owes me one.
Similarly, I do not believe artists, historians, and other such "soft" majors are any different. They do what they do because it tickles their fancy - which is great, but let's not sit around and circle-jerk about the nobility of their cause and how everyone owes them a living.
> "I note a trend in the fields of study that are being praised: they are all dominated by men. We praise male fields and dismiss female fields"
This would be disturbing, but I do not see this. Do you have any links to this?
There are more valuable things to life than money. I challenge this reactionary view that the worth of a person's contribution to society can be measured by their salary. If a person chooses to enrich humanity's lot by providing value outside of the marketplace, it is the responsibility of society to support them. By refusing to do so, we all become poorer.
How is some random performance artist providing me value? And if they aren't, why should I "support" them? I they aren't providing value to me then why should I be obligated to pay them? I can understand paying for roads, schools, police--but this?
There's a mechanism in place for me to determine if I wish for an artist to provide me value. It's called "I pay them."
Oh, wait. I know--since you say that the contributions of these people cannot be measured by money, then clearly this "support" you mention is not money. Sure, I can do that. "Great Job, folks!"