Wealth Distribution in the USA

There's two different "values" being talked about. One is that which the company values the job at, and that is the wage they offer for the job. There is also the value to the bottom line that each job provides to the company, which can't be calculated for most jobs.Increasing the wage-value for a job does not add to the bottom-line-value for the company.

Needs to be done? In what way? What's the goal? I think minimum wage is due for an increase, but I doubt it'd noticeably reduce the poverty that I see around me. Meh, you can end up driving yourself out of workers and that'd be bad for business. And realize that the min-wage jobs are the ones that have low value to the workforce, too. Think about how bad it must be to be unemployed if you're willing to be that $2 a day shoe maker, or whoever. Some people were saying that these wages are so bad they're near starvation. Well that means that without those jobs, those people would just be dead. (I wonder if you can see effects on something like infant moratality rates of an area when a large business moves in) I feel ya. It'd be nice if society could just not buy the product because the jobs they use are too bad, or willingly pay more for them so they can be better. I don't see much personal eththics in business, so that's where government steps in. But that's almost just as bad as the businesses. And we don't want to end up screwing up the economy too much. Governments end up using a lot of money, so you need the businesses to thrive. It takes money to make money, and the more you make the more you can make. How much more money does your Queen have than you? The graphs in OP's video showed how much its snowballed. If something needs to be done, what's it going to be? How do you restrain profit without hurting business? I don't know anything about global tax. If you spread that money out to the left, then aren't you increasing the amount of people who are near starvation? Is that better? Can you change the curve? You'd have to change the formula. Hopefully it would be stable. We know it can get volatile. I don't think there's a simple answer to this one.

No, not for any job. Unless I misunderstanding what you mean by "given the market"? But companies can get competitive with finding employees. Too, if you were right, then how did we get these overpriced executives that are being complained about? Sure, but when I want a good steak, I don't go to the cheapest steakhouse in town. And I refuse to eat cheap sushi. How many people have you hired at the business you work for, Jon? Well, there also Job evaluation:

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A job evaluation is a systematic way of determining the value/worth of a job in relation to other jobs in an organization. It tries to make a systematic comparison between jobs to assess their relative worth for the purpose of establishing a rational pay structure.

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That's pretty much exactly what we're saying. Well, it makes sense to me. It accurately describes the kind of process I went through for the last 4 or 5 QC lab techs that we hired.

What portion of the economic benefit to the company to you give to the engineer as his wage? Is it a fair amount or not?

I'm not sure that needs to be done, but okay. I agree. I think that should be illegal. I consider it immoral. How much taxes do the wealthy pay?Take a look at the report from the Congressional Budget Office.

So are they receiving a fair wage, that is the right portion of the economic benefit they provide to the company, or not? How do you tell?This all started because it was claimed that someone who made X dollars a day was being screwed because they were surely adding more economic benefit to the company than that. But there's nothing sure about that at all. We don't know how much benefit they added.People also seem to think that working hard means your worth more, or the jobs that make the product come to life (like the shoe maker) are adding an awful lot to the whole company. Meanwhile, the executive who just landed a huge increase in sales with a couple of emails, well, he hardly did anything so he's overpaid.They're not measuring anything with anything other than their heart. They feel like its unfair so therefore it must be. And if we don't jump on the bandwagon then we're evil too. But how do you know if they are anomalies or not if you can't even determine if it is fair for the jobs that you do know a bit about assessing. Why should I think you are correctly assessing these jobs that you don't know anything about? How much economic benefit do they really add? More or less than the franchisee who put forward the capital investment to open up the stores in that town in the first place? None of those people would even have that job if he didn't do that. But now because he's sitting at home collecting the profits he's all of a sudden the bad guy? One sole min-wage worker provides almost no economic benefit whatsoever.Also, it takes a whole bunch of the min-wage workers to get it done. If it takes 10 min-wage workers to run a McDonalds, that $77/hour... $160,000/year. If the franchisee is collecting that same salary to do the books, is he being unfairly paid too high and they're being unfairly paid too low? How do you tell?And where do you think most of that public expense comes from? The wealthy pay for most of the federal government, so they're already getting some of their wealth redistributed back to the low wage workers they employ. Its just a convoluted loop that isn't giving people the warm fuzzies, so therefore it must be wrong even though they cannot show that it is. Its easy to paint a picture of this great wage anomaly when you get to pick the details. But what is really happening out in the real world? Most people with big salaries are actually the ones who are providing all the economic benefit to the company. Its not the lowly wage workers. And that's besides the fact that they're a dime a dozen and we've got 50 applications in the cabinet if we need to scoop up another one. Good executives are a lot harder to come by and they're in a much more competitive market. But you're assessing the economic benefit with your emotions, not with facts. Why should I believe that you've assessed them correctly?I think you're entirely wrong about how much benefit each side is providing. If you want to claim that a person is unfairly paid because they're not getting enough of a portion of the economic benefit that they are adding to the company, then you should be able to show that the portion is in fact low. If you can't, then how do you know that its unfair?

No, but it doesn't happen for the vast majority of jobs. No, because the cost of employing them is rarely exceeded. Usually, there's no question that employing one more person is affordable. Usually the business is making plenty of money to warrant the new hires, otherwise they don't go hiring people. If you stand to loose millions of dollars if you don't hire them, then its a no brainer if your paying them tens of thousands of dollars a year. If you network engineers are still having down-times, then you need another guy.But at no point do you actually go: this engineer will provide the company with X number of dollars, so therefore we are going to pay him Y number of dollars. That's the point you're missing. No, but the only way you can answer the question is with an unrealistic example that has the answer pre-loaded into it.In the real world, even in your own job where you know about the details, you cannot answer the question.

An economic benefit assessment does not have to be done in order to have good hiring practices. For manufacturing, all you have to do is build the labor costs into your overhead and have your margin exceed that. You don't have to figure out how much economic benefit a box stacker adds to the product because you're selling it for more than it costs you to make it, including paying that guy to stack the boxes. You've misunderstood, I wasn't talking about your job. Your economic benefit assessment for the network engineer, in Message 195, never contained the phrase "the network engineer will provide an econominc benefit of X"The question was "How much economic benefit does the individual provide?" You can't answer it in your assessment for the network engineer, the one where you know about the details, so why should I think you could do it for a job where you don't know the details? Sure, but the point your missing is that you'll never find this piece of information: "Charlie, in his job, provided the company with $53,724 last year." When you say that somebody is grossly underpaid because they are not receiving a large enough portion of the economic benefit that they provide to the company, you're implying that you know how much economic benefit they provide. Otherwise, how could you say that their portion is too small? Then demonstrate it. How much economic benefit does a low wage worked add to a business? You're just Begging the Question. Where are these businesses? Are they privately owned? How do you know how much economic benefit the charman's son is providing? A minimum wage worker provides little to no economic benefit to a company. If you think otherwise, demonstrate it.Its only when you have a whole bunch of them that you start to get an appreciable amount of benefit. But, at that point, you are actually paying quite a bit for all those people.Too, the people who make most of the money are the ones who are paying for the federal government, so its all just coming back around anyways. The economic benefits that a worker adds to a company do not belong to the worker, they belong to the owners of the company.

This all started from Message 83:

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The factory worker earns his pay. The local company he works most likely earns a profit as well, as do the suppliers of the materials used in the shoes.

That's a cop out answer. The factory worker is given his pay which is a small fraction of the value he adds to the materials he starts with. Surely the value he adds is more than 2-3 dollars per day.

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Percy's first post in this thread was a reponse to that with the appropriate question:

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Surely the value he adds is more than 2-3 dollars per day.

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What calculations determine the value he adds? How can you say the value he adds is actually 2-3 dollars per day if someone else can do the same job just as well but for only 1-2 dollars per day?

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And its still the same thing I'm asking you...You say that someone indisputably and demonstrably adds more economic benefit to a company than he is being paid to the point that its unfair to pay them that low.In order to determine that, we need to know how much economic benefit they are adding. And that's something you can't determine.

Except for the fact that its impossible to calculate how much economic benefit they are providing. It may well be a part of the problem, but its a fact nonetheless (except that nobody is saying "utterly and completely" divorced). And you note - realizing the impossibility of the calculation doesn't mean you think there should be absolutely no link whatsoever.When we look at the real world, we see that people who benefit companies more do get paid more. But that's the position you are defending against. If you don't want to defend it then don't. The answer to the very first question I asked you in this thread would have required a calculation like that and you carried on down the path as if we were right on track. No, it really isn't. We don't calculate how much benefit we're going to get from box-stackers and then figure out if we're going to hire some more or not. We figure out how much work it is going to take to fulfil the order and then hire however many box-stackers its going to take to get it done, usually with a couple extra just in case. If they don't have any boxes to stack, they can sweep the floor or something. But there's plenty of margin built into the product to cover the cost of overhead, including labor. There's so much wiggle room that we don't need to worry about having too many box-stackers. There would be a bunch of them standing around not stacking boxes and then we would just tell them to go home if there's no work for them to do. Nope. Let's add up the cost of every single low wage position within McDonalds* and see what portion of their income that is. I doubt their income is several orders of magnitude more than that.*McDonalds is probably a bad choice for these calculations give their sheer sizeOn the other hand, consider how much economic benefit just one low wage position at McDonalds provides. I say its almost none. We can see from the pay they offer that McDonalds thinks its very low.How many more burgers do you think they'll sell that day if they bring in one more min-wage employee?And actually, in food service your whole economic benefit calculation isn't used either. The amount of workers they determine they need is based on how much sales they expect to have, how much work they think will need to be done. The managers keep track of their labor costs per hour. When the amount of sales per hour starts declining and the labor cost begins approaching a pre-determined percentage of sales, then they start sending people home.

I don't know what it should be, and the way it is differs between various types of jobs. For a lot of jobs there is very little link at all: I just explained to you how food service does it, and how manufacturers do it.For jobs where the link is more obvious, like sales, then people usually move to a commission based system. That's because some of your arguments depend on that being the case.

Its right here: How do you determine how much economic benefit they are providing so you can figure that it far outstrips their pay?

Some jobs are divorced from the economic benefit they provide, like a box-stacker, others are directly tied to it, like a used car salesman.

If I thought you were more interested in understanding me than just having a joke at my expense, then I would.

Yeah but when you can't make a joke, then you tend to just not reply at all.So I don't see any reason for me to put any effort into replying to you; I'll either get made fun of or it will be for naught.But you can find some of my reasoning on the box-stackers at the end of Message 342. Used car salesmen often get paid purely on commission; that's the best example I could come up with at the time for a wage that's married to the economic benefit provided.