> How could the relative positions of these workers not fall as all these tech-enabled and scale-enabled neighbors come on to the scene?
I’d like to see this worked out for real.
On the one hand, sure, a hairdresser cuts the same amount of hair as they did 25 years ago, and a fancy tech worker produces enormously more output than 25 or 50 years ago.
On the other hand, why does it follow that that tech worker should have an amount of take-home pay equal to vastly more haircuts per month than a comparable worker 25 or 50 years ago? A modern programmer does not actually need more haircuts, or more food, or more lattes, or more housing, or more doctor visits than a comparable worker any other time in the last 50 years.
So maybe something is actually wrong with the profitability of modern non-labor-intensive companies and the tax system such that their owners and employees are wildly overpaid compared to lower-productivity workers.
I’m thinking more of paying people on the margin or of some kind on tax system that compensates for inequality a bit.
Not fully worked out, but consider: suppose there are 100 people in the population, and a bunch of them are ambivalent between tech work and jobs like hairdressing. If tech work paid 10% more than hairdressing, some would do tech work and some would cut hair. If tech work paid 200%, then maybe there would be too many applicants and the employers would reduce wages. (I’ve occasionally contemplated that perhaps one reason that the big Silicon Valley employers pay so much is kind of anticompetitive: they can afford it, so they might as well, because it makes it more expensive to compete with them.)
Or alternatively, imagine if taxes were structured so that owning more than one house were highly discouraged (with appropriate provisions to make owning properties to rent them out make sense, which is something that a lot of legislators get wrong), and if permitting to build houses were not absurdly restrictive, then many different jobs with very different salaries would could still result in having enough income to afford to live in approximately one house. Some might afford two (!), and some might afford one that is much fancier than someone else’s, but if the pressure that makes someone like a hairdresser need to compete against a highly paid tech worker to pay for a similar house went away, the situation could be much improved.
(California, like many places, has strictly too few residential units in the places that people want to live, so just adjusting prices won’t help much.)
I’d like to see this worked out for real.
On the one hand, sure, a hairdresser cuts the same amount of hair as they did 25 years ago, and a fancy tech worker produces enormously more output than 25 or 50 years ago.
On the other hand, why does it follow that that tech worker should have an amount of take-home pay equal to vastly more haircuts per month than a comparable worker 25 or 50 years ago? A modern programmer does not actually need more haircuts, or more food, or more lattes, or more housing, or more doctor visits than a comparable worker any other time in the last 50 years.
So maybe something is actually wrong with the profitability of modern non-labor-intensive companies and the tax system such that their owners and employees are wildly overpaid compared to lower-productivity workers.