Re:50% of All Workers Made Less than $26,000 in 2010
by prodigal_erik on Thursday October 20, 2011 @07:26PM
(#3137599)
By the time a million people have learned the incantation, the value of teaching it to one more person is much lower, because it was already pretty easy to find one. No matter how important the labor is, at some point we have enough people doing it, and the pay is supposed to be a signal that attracts people to other needs which aren't being met.
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Re:50% of All Workers Made Less than $26,000 in 2010
by hackinthebochs on Thursday October 20, 2011 @09:40PM
(#3137938)
No argument from me there. But this is where I think the burden is also on society, not solely on the individual to reinvent themselves to find a niche. The purpose of society is to manage scarce resources. No one has a "right" to more resources than the next guy, simply because he has a particular skill. It is society that sets up the environment for these vasts imbalances of distribution, where an 'arbitrary' skill can reward you with vast amounts of wealth. Thus it is the burden of society to create mechanisms to balance this distribution.
Capitalism is preferable because it can manage resources better than any central planning can (at least pre-strong AI), but since imbalance is inherent in capitalism its also imperative to provide opportunities to mitigate imbalances within the system, in the form of education, skill training, etc.