Les Jones

Economics > Thoughts on Fair Wages

Sometimes I collect quotes and links on certain themes, and publish them when I have enough. The theme here is why some jobs pay more than others.

Mickey Kaus:

I didn't think I'd ever again have to discuss "comparable worth," one of the really bad ideas from the comic book era of interest group liberalism in the Carter years. But John Roberts' opposition to the idea ("staggeringly pernicious") is now being filed under a general "Roberts Resisted Women's Rights" headline. ... The truth is that "comparable worth" shouldn't just be opposed by those on the Right who worry (correctly) that it is "anti-capitalist." It should also be opposed by those on the Left who recognize that it's fundamentally inegalitarian and elitist. ...

Put simply, comparable worth would require that judges adjust market wages for jobs that were historically disproportionately male or disproportionately female. So you have toll collector--a historically male job. It's also an excruciatingly boring job. Or garbage collector--a smelly job. To compensate for the boredom, or the smell, you have to pay the toll and garbage collectors a little bit more in the marketplace. With "comparable worth," a judge would review the toll and garbage collectors' jobs and notice that they don't require much "skill" and "education" and actually reduce the wage (or the future increase in the wage).

Clayton Cramer:

One of the greatest economic ignorance errors with respect to pricing is "fair wages." Why should a plumber get paid more than a teacher? The left likes to argue that a teacher's work is more valuable than a plumber's work, and the low pay of teachers is just because women dominate the profession, and women's work is not highly valued by our society.

There are some jobs that are intrinsically nicer than others. Teaching (from my limited experience with it, and from watching my wife do it) is a very satisifying activity. My experience working under houses, putting in sewer pipes (don't ask why--it's a long story involving a rental we lived in), tells me that it is not a very satisifying activity--quite the opposite. If you asked me whether I would rather teach for $30,000 a year, or work under houses with spiders and sewer pipes for $100,000 a year--well, that's easy. I'll teach, thank you.

Megan McArdle, guest-blogging at Instapundit:

There is a tendency among liberal arts types to think that it is grossly unfair that investment bankers make so much money, when said artsy type's clearly more socially valuable work is so pitifully renumerated. Having spent a summer doing it, I personally think that anyone who is willing to spend his Saturday night going over the fine print in an SEC prospectus until 2 am is welcome to all the filthy lucre they will pay him. I chose to become a journalist because I've only got forty or fifty years left on this planet, and if I'm going to spend the majority of my waking hours doing something, I'd rather do something I feel is worthwhile than something that will buy me a cushy place to sleep. It seems downright piggy for those of us with what my mother calls "English Major Jobs" to demand both fulfilling work and lavish renumeration.

And another McArdle post:

I find it odd, too, that so many academics profess to be egalitarians, yet academia as a whole has produced one of the most radically inegalitarian societies to be seen since Louis XVI fled Versailles. Many academics of my acquaintance profess to be aghast at the "status seeking" in which their neighbours engage--and yet I have never met anyone as obsessed with collecting professional merit badges as an academic. Nor have I experienced any other organisational culture, even in hyper-competitive consulting or investment banking, in which professional success is so readily confused with personal worth.

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In other words, as I have always longed to ask John Kenneth Galbraith, "if you think that we should equalise the distribution of income, why do you not think that we should equalise the distribution of PhDs?"