I believe that's part of the reason it's not really possible to get numbers like 5 times the average salary in Norway, while it definitely is as a software engineer in the US.

All such information is public there?

What you pay in taxes is public (anyone can look it up), and it's normally easy to calculate taxable income from that. (Not always, there could be various events that throws the calculation off).

Although in recent years, all lookups are logged and displayed to the other party, which has a chilling effect. I would like the old system back.

So you want the data to be public, but you don't want the data about who accesses the data to be public?

You bring up a very good point, but I'm not sure I see an inconsistency here,

Tax records are records owned and controlled by the government. It's information that has already been collected, and is accessible by some institutions, but not others, creating an imbalance in information.

I want government to be transparent, and I generally support initiatives to make information public. But I'm not sure I like the idea of the government or some other big brother type knowing who is accessing what information. I say that as a general principle, with notable exceptions.

Yes, and excellence is not rewarded in such societies.

Edit: Look at how pay works in countries where such information is public (i.e. Scandinavia). My understanding is that within a given line of work, everyone makes just about the same amount, adjusted for seniority, regardless of performance.

Could you elaborate? This looks like a very throw-away, pithy comment.

Edit: Thanks

See my edit.

That's a bit different than "excellence not being rewarded" isn't it? Salaries in general seem to be very non-meritocratic, and there are other ways of compensating exceptional people that don't wind up in the check.

I want money for my work, thank you very much. And if I provide more value to my employer, I expect more money than the guy who provides less.

Yes, it's up to me to make sure I'm getting my fair share. If I'm too insecure to get what I'm worth, that seems like my problem, not anyone else's.

This happens also in germany and spain and europe in general.

Its just america that pays so damn much for developers, because of the competing capital. Price transparency is definitely not harming employees, and its also not harming companies in the long run.

And doctors and lawyers, and everyone else on average too.

And while average pay is higher in America than in any other large (i.e. necessarily general purpose) economy, I'm specifically pointing out that performance/merit reward is greater in America.

I'll disregard the use of merit, but how do you measure performance to make this claim?

Im sure there are less performant lawyers in america that have a higher pay than performant lawyers in europe. AFAIK high salaries in the U.S. dont come at the expense of low salaries of the low performing.

Doctors have constrained supply. Lawyers have a sort of costrained supply (your degree will determine your employment). U.S. has a peculiar law system and company sizes that allow payouts not possible in other countries which affect pay(corporate lawyers make the most money).

But again, almost surely, this is not due to information asymmetry in favor of the employer. Public wage data would almost unequivocally increase wages. The question would be how much.

Greenspan talks about how in a desire to punish high salary CEO's, they forced their salaries to be public, and they ended up exploding up because of it.

I think people would find disparate outcomes among gender/race/etc. and claim discrimination. This will lead to more uniformity as employers try to avoid legal and political liability, however unfounded the claims of discrimination are. The not-so-subtle point that unequal outcomes don't mean discrimination seems to be totally lost in political discourse.

You're right that doctors and lawyers are not great examples for the reasons you state.

If everyone knows what everyone makes, it becomes much harder to give an excellent employee more money. Everyone thinks they deserve a raise, so now a manager has to confront the rest of the team when he gives one person a raise. Envy is a very powerful force.

Performance for this purpose doesn't need to be measured in OneTrueWay, the market provides a better solution: at what point your employer is willing to see you walk to another job instead of paying you more. (They may have their own formal performance ranking system, but if it's not very good they'll lose the battle for talent.) This has the side effect that assertive people are at an advantage, but I don't think that's a bad thing.

As for CEOs, that's a very interesting point. My intuition is that it's a totally different kind of market. The CEO is the boss, not one among many equals. And you can't deny that the information has stirred up animosity and resentment toward the CEO class, however ill- or well-founded that sentiment is.

> If everyone knows what everyone makes, it becomes much harder to give an excellent employee more money. Everyone thinks they deserve a raise, so now a manager has to confront the rest of the team when he gives one person a raise. Envy is a very powerful force.

I think economic modeling moves towards the opposite direction. First, people assume that other people make and still have that envy, and in that assumption they make mistakes. But there are severely underpaid people that would immediately get a better deal.

There are other interesting externality is that knowing what people make would allow people to jump jobs a lot clearer. One of my crusades in public opinion in argentina is that the salaries of college graduates is absolutely unknown, making it impossible to gauge how valuable each college degree is worth. Hence, lots of people commit to dead-end careers. If it were known how much the graduates made, less people would go there, and more people would go to the paying ones.

Same with jobs: knowing other company pays substantially more will move you, increasing the salary of the low paying companies and lowering the salary of the high paying companies.

In a very naive way, the lack of information prevents market efficiency, because if the information where there, people would do more and different trades. And this is algo good for companies in the long run, because they would more effectively attract the appropriate talent.

Think of it as any other market: housing for example. Is housing clearer or worse by having house sale prices open?

This doesn't happen in practice though. 99% of adults realize that different performance leads to difference in salary. 99% of adults can understand why their coworker gets paid more than them.

The "market solution" only awards to the best negotiators.

99% of adults? Tell that the "70 cents on the dollar" people. Half of America is walking around believing that women get paid 70 cents on the dollar for equal work, when that is not the case at all. The data is that the average pay of all women is 70% of the average pay of all men, which doesn't even try to account for the nature of the work, and is obviously highly confounded by career choice.

I think public wage data is more likely to reduce that kind of misconception than accelerate it.

Personally I think I've gone a bit deeper in this topic, because I also think that if taxes were public, people with the same job but different tax situation will have a different bargaining position, meaning salaries will be affected by the actual tax rates people pay.

I'm also interested in the visible effects of wealth and income regarding wages: do people with some money in the bank earn more money in general? (would it thus mean that the best investment is to get some cash first ?) etc.

For the more emotional argument, wouldn't public wages also prevent people with lower incomes giving money to higher incomes? Something that happens often is many human relationships where wealth can be hidden? Wouldn't you tip higher to the waitress you know is gaining well below what you think she would, and wouldn you demand more of your boss if you knew exactly how much more they made?

I'm not going to say its strictly better for everyone to have the information public, but I can rarely fathom believing that hiding information leads to better decisions. And isn't that what its all about. At this moment all these objections are a sort of growing pain, not objections for the long term.

salary is highly tied to performance for professional athletes and salary information is public information.

I'd laugh my ass off if the CEO/upper management of any company in the US had to actually report to their employees how much they made, and not just through salary. There would be an uprising.

Compensation packages for CEOs and upper management for public companies are, in fact, public in formation (in most cases, there are some exceptions). This sort of thing is routinely reported on by the press. This has been true for a long time.

No uprising, but there has been an upwelling of CEO compensation, as nobody wants to lose their CEO due to a lack of compensation.

IIRC, it's been one of the biggest driving forces in CEO's salaries skyrocketing.

I don't think, however, that it would have a similar effect on our (i.e. employees) salaries.

It's the Lake Wobegon effect. No company wants to say their CEO is below the mean, and pay is a signal of CEO quality, so every company is always trying to pay above the mean, and so the mean inexorably rises and rises.

"I don't think, however, that it would have a similar effect on our (i.e. employees) salaries."

Why not?

The full compensation for the officers of any public company is available publicly in their filings.

People already know CEO salaries for publicly traded companies, and there's been no uprising.

"completely rational nations"

Ah yes, of course, Norway is a rational nation and others are not. For whatever value of "rational" there is. Maybe you mean Norway exceptionally tightening immigration rules after the Swedish terror attacks? Or is it just public reporting of salary you like so much?

I like tightening immigration too. I wasn't saying that the US or other western nation wasn't rational. I was just saying that other countries that have their shit together as well make the exact opposite decision about salary transparency(or more correctly tax transparency).