News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Understanding the Historic Divergence Between Productivit... by sokoloff on Thursday September 03, 2015 @05:19PM (#10167592)
Bob's upward spiral of salary only works so long as there aren't a bunch of equally qualified Abel, Charlie, Dave, Ed, Frank, and George. If employer 2 needs someone to create that value and can pick amongst 10 employees, the salary of the job will not tend towards $100/hr.
Re:Understanding the Historic Divergence Between Productivit... by WalterBright on Thursday September 03, 2015 @05:24PM (#10167614)
A huge moneymaking opportunity in making 10x on investment in employees suggests that new employers will emerge to exploit it. Investment flows to where the money to be made is.

Unless, of course, they manage to keep Bob's productivity a secret, which is possible in the small but highly unlikely over an entire economy.

Re:Understanding the Historic Divergence Between Productivit... by jdmichal on Thursday September 03, 2015 @06:38PM (#10167911)
You said yourself in another post that you cannot assume that the productivity gains seen are evenly distributed. So I would propose that there is definitely an informational advantage for the company that currently employs Bob, because they know how much value Bob produces over his cost. How is another company supposed to gain this information, short of hiring Bob and finding out themselves? In which case, they rationally can really only be willing to pay Bob at some sort of expected average productivity.

The only information leak is how much Bob is currently paid. So in some ways it's actually to a company's advantage to basically average out the wages across a level based on the level's entire productivity, because it hides the truly productive from other companies. And this is exactly what we see with modern pay grades and scales.

Re:Understanding the Historic Divergence Between Productivit... by SilasX on Thursday September 03, 2015 @06:46PM (#10167946)
More likely, it will bid down the value of the output to $10.