>How does the median plumber fair between them? The median factory worker?
The median plumber or factory worker in the US makes 1.5 to 2x more than the median in western Europe, and the ratio is even higher post-tax. While in the year 2000 the numbers were similar. That's because US GDP per capita has grown faster over the past couple decades. Americans do have less time off but that's the same now as it was a couple decades ago.
Plus as we’re seeing the old social contract in places like France has been breaking down for a while because they don’t have the money or demographics to support it.
Then we often get the “All of the US compared to Norway” or similar comparisons that are more misleading than enlightening. Ask someone trying to get housing in Madrid how well the European dream is going. This isn’t to trumpet the successes of the US, more to puncture the delusional and backward-looking EU mindset.
Except the median blue collar worker in Europe doesn’t have the fear that they are one major illness away from bankruptcy or that they might lose their teeth because they can’t afford regular dental care.
This is incorrect. The median income is higher, but not 2x higher. Besides which American focus on Taxes (and GDP!) is just one of those little propaganda things the article talks about. Even for a plumber earning 1.5x in the US vs the EU, the EU plumber with his higher taxes will still have 3x disposable income after all other expenses, which are much lower in the EU vs the US.
I hate it when people say “give me references” but I struggle to imagine a trade worker who makes 1.5x (or 2x post taxes) has 1/3 the disposable income because expenses. Set aside the hobbyhorse of hardship medical issues and I don’t see possibly being true. Food is still expensive there, a PS5 costs the same the world around, and clothing is globalized. I’ve traveled to several EU countries recently, costs are not much if at all lower.
Outside CUDA (which they can't compete on because of IP law), AMD is doing just fine with competitive GPUs. Look at the supercomputer top500 AMD GPU footprint: https://top500.org/lists/top500/list/2026/06
Ask almost anyone here and they'll tell you that the C-suite are mostly a bunch of morons who don't know anything about technology, and now you want to ensure that businesses can only ever be run by such technologically illiterate morons, not founders? Insanity!
> working class the means to avoid tax and pay for illegal things
Peanuts. It is still the rich that spend the most in illegal things from bribes, tax evasion, etc. even for countries trying to avoid international sanctions.
The bigger the more they profit from crime and lack of accontability.
>In my opinion this is an acceptable price to pay to reduce pay inequality, which often is much more than 2%. It is also a good argument for joining a union.
A company has a fixed amount of money it can spend on wages. Reducing wage inequality means paying less to the best employees and more to the others, which is great if you just want to slack off but terrible if you're already one of the highest paid employees.
That theory rests on the assumption that your salary is based on how good you are at your job. But if that were the case then corporate life wouldn't be full of people complaining "my boss is an idiot and yet (s)he makes ten times what I do".
I'll argue that money goes to those who are best at internal politics, with perhaps a moderate correlation with work performance.
> perhaps a moderate correlation with work performance
The only time I have seen a correlation greater than 0 is where bonuses where directly linked to earnings or sales ... even then the correlation was not 1
> The only time I have seen a correlation greater than 0 is where bonuses where directly linked to earnings or sales
Maybe I've been lucky to work for moderately reasonable companies, but I've never seen that.
For example in my current company, yearly raises are directly tied to performance rating. And while there is subjectivity in the rating, it is basically impossible to squeeze in a high performer rating for someone who doesn't do anything even if I wanted to (which I don't). It is also impossible to give a very low rating to someone that all peers see doing great work.
The correlation will never be a perfect 1.0, but it is closer to 1 than to 0. Low performers end up getting low to nothing in raises, and the high performers get a multiplier that increases their raises.
> It is also impossible to give a very low rating to someone that all peers see doing great work.
I work at a smaller company now, with a lot of very good people, so I've been happy enough with my rating and bumps.
When I was at "bigcorp", I was still as good at my job, but I didn't play the game very well. I presume I was not visible enough to be rated highly by my peers (peers aren't those in your team, but outside your team) and so I didn't see the rate of progression I think I merited, and eventually left.
I'm pro salary transparency, but both things are true and OP should not be downvoted:
- Some employee salary discrepancies are inefficiencies due to humans sucking at rationally evaluating other people
- Some employee salary discrepancies are legitimate outcomes of value produced relative to other employees
The problem is the more we create policy assuming the first one is true, we eliminate everyone in the second category (however small or large that category), making the economy less efficient. I would argue pay transparency isn't one of those policies however, and in fact would lead to more efficiencies.
That said, all interventions have consequences, and less growth and higher inefficiency from cutting tall poppies is indeed a risk. As someone in Europe, our total lack of productivity growth is leading to collapsing governments, underwater social entitlement systems and mass riots. These are serious issues that should be discussed and not dismissed outright with downvotes.
Now you've permanently handed power to employers to claim every year is "a tough year" and pay people less, while tricking people into uprooting their lives and taking jobs under the pretense of "the salary is low but you usually get a crazy big bonus!"
Let me guess, your next rebuttal:
> "But then we'll create more policy to try to stop the downsides of the first policy we created!"
Now you have a patchwork of 48,000 regulations all collectively harming the efficiency of the economy and creating all sorts of weird un-intended consequences and loopholes for low-trust people to game instead of rewarding honest people for doing the right thing like you intended.
The thing about employee ownership is that, almost by definition, employees don't have much capital (that's why they live by selling their labour) and businesses need capital to survive. That capital has a cost, either interest on loans or profits going to outside shareholders.
My actual response "But then we will have to deal with biases, discretion and management collecting their 10mil bonus by giving the juniors a pittance"
The flip side of course is people who actually work in bonus heavy revenue generating roles - where the impact is easy to measure - tend to leave if they are not valued and take their clients with them.
Things work a lot better in a healthy economy with competition and low friction for people to move around - exploitation blossoms when people are trapped by economic circumstances
This is the lump of labour fallacy, right? Companies don't actually have to have fixed labour budgets; indeed ideally firms should be always willing to hire/retain a worker at a salary less than that workers marginal revenue product, as this is profit maximising.
Apart from the general difficulty of organising like this and actually evaluating the marginal revenue from an additional employee (it's hard enough to attribute to your existing employees!), this marginal revenue is likely to have diminishing returns as the company grows and from a risk management point of view you will want to have some margin so that you don't flip into losing money as soon as business slows a little.
Companies can decide to do it however they want. They don't have to conform to a platonic ideal of a bureaucracy. A company expecting to grow its market share will give it's managers more leeway than one that's under financial difficulties.
What can happen, which is why you may have seen budget constraints prevent profit-maximising hiring, is that the finance dept is operating off older information than the managers in business units (or just is crosswise with them for any reason at all). You can definitely get a situation in which managers can't get approval to do profit maximising hires, but this isn't inevitable.
I can imagine that this is the dynamic which for actual x10 developers makes flexible YC-style startups more appealing than rigid FAANG-level companies.
How well correlated are the highest paid employees to the best employees, though? My guess would be that salary correlates strongly with self-belief, charisma, and negotiation skills
These very much tend to strongly correlate. You're definitely more confident in negotiating and counter-offering if you have 10x skill as your leverage.
That’s not at all the case. Five of us recently moved internally via a remapping and they gave us pay rises. I negotiated 15% more than the initial offer, everyone else took the initial offer. Roughly same ability.
Indeed the only reason I could do this was because the new salary ranges were shown thanks to pay transparency.
I would speculate that 10x devs' underestimation primarily concerns their percentile ranking relative to peers, not necessarily their absolute skill. Comparing yourself to the likes of Carmack and Wozniak is what pushes you to become cracked in the first place.
Imagining this problem is just a sign that your company can't do pay grades or job titles properly. Or work out the concept called a "bonus".
The thing is, if you're rewarding performance through _process_ it ends up being more public and you have to have a written justification for it. Not just favouritism.
Someone's a piece of garbage if they expect the rest of humanity to subsidize their hobby but never shed a tear for the millions of factory workers dispossessed by automation.
Without the owners of the productive forces the productive forces wouldn't exist. Go to North Korea if you want to see what it looks like when nobody's allowed build their own business.
North Korea was doing better than South Korea until America panicked and invested huge amounts into South Korea, creating the Chaebol system of enormous companies owned by a few families under a political dictatorship that over time has liberalized somewhat.
The median plumber or factory worker in the US makes 1.5 to 2x more than the median in western Europe, and the ratio is even higher post-tax. While in the year 2000 the numbers were similar. That's because US GDP per capita has grown faster over the past couple decades. Americans do have less time off but that's the same now as it was a couple decades ago.
reply