All I said is that it might be excessive to pay 40% of public employee's individually [1] 40k more a year than the median household income [2] in the area.

Don't equate that with arguing for Austerity.

https://www.openthebooks.com/forbes-why-san-francisco-is-in-... [1] https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/sanfranciscocitycalifornia [2]

Are you not arguing that public sector employees in San Francisco should get a pay cut?

Not really, all I did was question the OP scoffing that an 150k salary is not a lot of money. My mother is a public school teacher.

It's not a lot of money in San Francisco, where you're fighting with every tech company employee for housing

Do you have a quantitive way of making the distinction of what "a lot" is? 150k is substantially more than the average SF household, and is about 83 percentile for individuals.

https://dqydj.com/income-by-city/

Average home prices in SF is 1.3M, so a household of two teachers would give them a P/E ratio of 5. The P/E ratio for the average US home is 4.4.

Are teachers overpaid, or are people in SF underpaid relative to the value of a house?

a P/E ratio of 4.4 is nuts. The fact that we normalized that is wild. Same for committing 30% of net income to housing.

That's right. I enjoy phrasing social problems in the language of software engineering so I'll do that here. The structures which enable these salaries are a Chesteron's Fence[1]. Shooting from the hip ignores second-order effects[2] and is a thought terminating rhetorical pattern. It's the equivalent of trying random code to fix a bug without doing root-cause analysis. If I tried to do any of these on a development team I'd expect someone to take me aside and kindly explain the consequences. For some reason (which I'd be happy to understand) all of these valuable mental tools are left on the bench when we move out of development and into other realms. They are powerful techniques to understand systems of all types -- we should aspire to use them whenever we can.

1. https://fs.blog/chestertons-fence/

2. https://personalmba.com/second-order-effects/

Agreed that it is important to understand things on a systems level, but at what point are we not talking about Chesterton's Fence but The Divine Right of Kings/Mandate of Heaven.

This feels risky, like a reply to a rhetorical question. For me the difference between the two is the acknowledgement of human authorship. Chesterton's Fence assumes human authorship leaving open the possibility for change, while the The Divine Right of Kings/Mandate of Heaven explicitly buries its authorship in an attempt to crystalize it as immutable. Feel free to disagree, but it feels like we're drifting away from the plot.

My thought is that your claim that setting salaries is a complicated process and we shouldn't rashly come to judgement, while not untrue, is also in effect saying "ours is not to wonder why" and that because high salaries exists therefore they are legitimate a la Divine Right of Kings.