> Your compensation isn't determined by nobility or a sense of equity.

The parent says that in Japan it is, to some extent.

> When a market doesn't reflect that, it is horribly broken and will be horribly abused by the participants.

The parent says he prefers what you call horribly broken.

It is possible to defend a pure free market labor system without trying to pass off everything else as science fiction, y'know.

> Your compensation isn't determined by nobility or a sense of equity.

> It's determined by the difficulty of the job.

I strongly disagree. Example: working in a sweatshop is infinitely more difficult than being a software engineer and pays infinitely less.

Your compensation is determined by a big set of factors that I'm sure a sociologist could spell out for us all. I argue that the difficulty of the job is in fact not nearly as important as other factors like race/ethnicity, gender, mental health, etc.

> When a market doesn't reflect that, it is horribly broken and will be horribly abused by the participants.

Eh... I'm not sure such a market exists.

I think with "difficult" he didn't mean how physically taxing it is, but how hard it is to find people who can do it. Almost anybody can to the work in a sweat shop after a couple of days (weeks?) of training. Becoming a programmer is not something everybody can do and even for those who can it takes years of study before they are competitive on the job market.

That's not the complete truth either. Where I live there has been a nurse shortage for a long time, but they're not paid better anyway.

Before you say education, some specialist nurses have almost as much education as doctors. They don't receive close to the same pay.

Most of the answer is cultural expectations.

Big difference between the following two scenarios:

Simple, not easy (sweatshop) Difficult, not hard (programming)

I'm not sure about that, any software engineer could work in a sweatshop, the reverse isn't true.

You're missing a dimension here: Your salary is determined in large part by your ability to negotiate.

Jobs are not open market. There's no information clarity about what your competitors for a job are likely to demand. Consequently, you can't depend on the magical hand alone to determine your salary.

Are you talking about in America? It's true that salaries aren't totally transparent, but you really have to stick your head in the ground to not have any idea what a given job pays: http://www.glassdoor.com/

Or even better: http://www.salar.ly/

while accurate, remember that is of foreigners working in US only (read: mostly H1Bs)

This is only partially true. Even before the internet people talked to each other. You knew basically what you should be making for a given position.

I've negotiated salary on every job after the first. I probably ended up with a few extra percent, but it wasn't major.

> It's determined by the difficulty of the job. The more difficult the job, the less people are able to do it, the smaller the supply of labor for that position, the higher the paycheck. It's that simple.

I wish the world worked that way. In reality, difficult programming jobs (say game engine programmer) or research positions pay less than code monkey jobs at big corps.