I can’t fathom pointing to a market that cannot compete globally (Canada’s software engineering job market) and somehow thinking it’s impressive. Knocking everyone down to achieve equality is not desirable.
I’m more interested in approaches that provide safety nets and mobility upward. Not ones that eliminate the paths upward.
It is obviously unfair to penalise people for bad luck. It is also unfair for those with good luck to use the talents which fortune has gifted them to extort society, to demand that they receive multiple times more money than the normal citizen lest they deny society their talents and leave. Obviously fairness is not the only relevant value, but it is relevant.
I don't think it is healthy for a society to stream their most talented citizens into high-paying and stable jobs, and to discard the rest as losers that are best forgotten, condemned to low-pay, casualised and insecure work. It is precisely this kind of dual society in which we now live, that is tearing at the social fabric, creating the kind of anger and resentment that produced Trump - and it is profoundly wrong.
I note that the NHS pays doctors markedly less than they would receive in North America, though it is still a considerable amount. Yet we have no real brain drain. The most common reason doctors give for remaining in the UK, besides friends and family, is that they believe in the NHS as a public service provided free at the point of use for the common good. The motives and self-conception of the medical profession has not always been pecuniary. In The Politics, Aristotle is emphatic that medicine is a craft whose end is the good, which is corrupted insofar as it is treated as a means to making money.
Complete and utter bullshit. There are vast amounts of information available on what incomes are for jobs. Unless people have a mental or physical disability, they can put in the effort to train for something more than a trivial minimum wage job.
The average amount of hours spent on watching tv shows, movies, playing video games, etc means that time to improve is not in short supply. As a society we shouldn’t encourage people who want to just coast and contribute very little of what society wants (labor demand).
> to demand that they receive multiple times more money than the normal citizen lest they deny society their talents and leave
The entitlement is palpable here. Nobody is a heart surgeon by by birth. It takes decades of sacrifice and hard work. Very few people are willing to do that and talent only plays a small part. That’s why doctors still make a multiple in the UK of “the normal citizen”: https://www.erieri.com/salary/job/cardiac-surgeon/united-kin...
> and to discard the rest as losers that are best forgotten, condemned to low-pay, casualised and insecure work.
False dichotomy. The rest should be spending time training for skilled jobs. We should absolutely discourage people from getting a BA in Political Science and then spending their life making coffee and shitposting on Twitter. It’s an incredible waste of personal and societal potential.
> I note that the NHS pays doctors markedly less than they would receive in North America, though it is still a considerable amount. Yet we have no real brain drain.
See above. Your doctors make way more than even US software engineers (the thing I’m saying Canadian SWEs should aspire to). You don’t have brain drain because you pay them many multiples of “normal people”.
But of course they do. Talents and a good surrounding environment aren't worth anything without a lot of education and effort. Why shouldn't a successful doctor be rewarded for that effort.
It is controversial (though a widespread belief among philosophers), but I believe that human talent is entirely a function of the interaction of genes and environment. We don't control the neighborhood in which we are born, the school in which we're enrolled, the values instilled in us, or our temperamental inclination to learning. I believe, for similar reasons, that we don't control our own effort. Humans don't stand apart from the naturalistic universe, but are a part of it. Others claim that while genes and environment play the largest role in determining our talents, we also have a degree of volition in those constraints with which to make better or worse use of those conditions, and for which we should be awarded responsibly. Either way, on the strong or weak version, our talents are largely our of our control, and it is therefore unfair to heavily reward or punish people for them.
I'm also extremely sceptical of the idea that high-earning jobs demand more effort. I have a PhD and it required a fair amount of work. My immediate family were all in unskilled, low-paying jobs which they found boring, and derived little satisfaction from. Who put more effort in? We both had to work, but I found it interesting and fulfilling, whereas they did not. For them, there was a far greater gap between what they were doing and what they wanted to be doing. I think it's obvious that their jobs required more effort in any morally relevant sense. The relationship between effort and pay seems fairly incidental, but a general trend is that the more you are paid, the more likely the job is to exercise and develop your faculties. In this respect, the trendline goes from harder to easier with pay.
Knocking everyone down to achieve equality is not desirable.
https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/clarissajanlim/msnbc-ma...
The fact that a news anchor didn’t realize that was complete bullshit is an example of how mistaken people are about what “making the rich pay” will accomplish.
If I had to swap lives with a random citizen of any nation, it certainly would not be the US.
I don't like the odds that I'd find myself incarcerated for shoplifting groceries, or living in a tent city, or crapping in a donut box in the back of an Amazon delivery van, or prostituting my ass to pay for insulin.
DoD spending helped build Silicon Valley when it was all fruit orchards, but other forces surpassed it in importance decades ago.
>There are countries that are quite impressive for their software engineering compared to the states and population. Sweden comes to mind and the taxes are a lot more steep there than in Canada.
If you credit defense spending with Silicon Valley today, you ought to do the same with Sweden. It, after, all, has an unusually large native defense industry. Saab jet fighters would not exist today if Stockholm hadn't decided decades ago that having an indigenous aircraft industry would be of value for geopolitical (as a neutral country) and economic reasons.
To be clear this is my opinion also. I'm not saying Canada's engineering market is impressive, just that this is the context in which this conversation comes up on HN. My question was posed as a platonic thought exercise.