So sad that any other system is completely impossible
What is corruption?
A software engineer doing the same work gets paid way more in SF than in London. State policies prevent free movement of labor between London and SF. State policies do not prevent free movement of capital across nations, as clearly seen by the number of megacorporations actually owned by weird subsidiaries in strange locations for tax purposes.
The trick would be to allow workers to capture all of their productivity rather than have a large amount of it syphoned off by owners.
How would you even compare that? How would you even measure your productivity? Lines of code? Tickets closed?
We can't even compare "productivity" in our own "profession", much less between different ones.
Fuck, even to think in terms of "professions" today seems so anachronistic... some of the best people I worked with were never trained, should we disregard them and go back to a world of credentialism and guilds?
> The trick would be to allow workers to capture all of their productivity rather than have a large amount of it syphoned off by owners.
More likely, entrepreneurs would simply automate the shit of out of their work and outsource what is not automatable to other service providers. And all of the "workers" who can not think for themselves will be left jobless and crying for someone to help them.
How would you measure your scarcity? It is similarly difficult. "Workers are paid according to their productivity" does not mean "there is a fixed mechanical pay formula based on lines of code or something".
> More likely, entrepreneurs would simply automate the shit of out of their work and outsource what is not automatable to other service providers. And all of the "workers" who can not think for themselves will be left jobless and crying for someone to help them.
If entrepreneurs can already do this, why the fuck are they paying so much money for engineers in the bay area? Wouldn't "can be replaced by machines" be the literal minimum possible scarcity?
Tim Cook working for one day could easily have a larger impact than most people will have in their entire lives because he has extremely high leverage.
Is it fair? Absolutely not, but life is not fair. I don't understand what moral obligation society should have to base compensation on productivity.
PS: you could argue that Tim Cook is far more productive than everyone else because he produces far more results than everyone else.
Of course. "Pay by productivity" does not mean "pay everybody the same per hour of labor". Cook's output has greater influence on the company than any (or perhaps almost any) other employee at Apple. He should be paid commensurate to that output.
I assumed you meant something along the lines "pay everybody the same per hour of labor" since that seems to be how most people describe productivity.
Not everybody is equally productive. Somebody who has more skill or knowledge in a profession like software engineering will be considerably more productive than a less skilled engineer. Among leftist circles, I think you'd be very hard pressed to find people who describe productivity as literally just "number of hours worked".
Exactly. And history is pretty clear that nearly everyone is worse off when society decides how to spend money instead of letting owners decide how to spend money. It's why every first world economy has a massive dose of capitalism and a tiny dose of socialism in their GDP. And why a significant part of the worst economies of the world don't.
>The idea of the specific "rightful" ownership of money we have today is not universal throughout history
Yet the poor (and pretty much everybody else too) in most of the world, if not all, today are vastly richer than the poor of the past.... Maybe there's a reason the world has moved away from the economic systems of the past?
