Its not just youth or politics. Its mostly culture and unwillingness to deviate from it, coupled with some strong expectations. People "expect" managers to be paid well, doctors to be paid well, etc, so they don't get angry at these people for getting paid well. On a smaller scale, only if you start deviating from the norm do people make mention or get angry, because a large part of Europe still solemnly believes in Calvinism (especially the Netherlands).
You end up with a risk-averse, middle-of-the-road populace where everything different from the status quo is quickly snuffed out and most stars only get to shine if they are lucky or working for an American megacorp, where excellence is valued more (with its own set of problems). I'd figure that has to do with our lack of a Silicon Valley equivalent as well.
I don't think this jas anything to do with cultural norms (trust me, I don't conform to many of them). It has to do with fairness, and our broken economic system rewarding the wrong things.
Well sure, but the power that sustains that mechanism is very unevenly distributed, and skewed towards the people it benefits. Most people have little choice but to go along with it in their day to day lives.
> If anything, most likely than not you are paid too little as people rarely maximize their negotiating leverage.
You mean, most likely I could be paid more. This is probably true. But it is not at all the same as deserving that pay.
If you take supply and demand as your moral system, then you can justify all sorts of immoralities, after all I have no doubt that there would be plenty of demand for assassins. As a society we choose to disincentivise assassination because we believe that we know better than the market. We can, do and should do the same for economic activity. And just because the status quo incentivises things in a certain way doesn't make it right.
The information is still available, but rate limited, and the person you look up will get a notification. So you can still look up last year's tax return of the person offering you a job - but that person might take offense.
That said, there are a couple of good reasons for the change; digital publication is qualitatively different from having to go down to the city administration to look up the numbers on paper - among other things it makes collecting/checking date of birth trivial (it's part of the dataset - which is municipality of residence, full name and dob).
Or in the case of Europe, if it's too high. Most youths here are very left leaning and don't like high earners so if you work in tech and want to make friends outside of tech you'd better not mention salaries.