Pastry Chefs Are in Demand, Why Aren’t Wages Rising?

There's definitely something to this:

I spent most of the last 15 years in Italy, where people care about their food. They care a lot, and will absolutely discriminate between various tomatoes based on where they're grown, different kinds of pasta, and many other things to boot.

In the US, I think we tend to just look at the price and mostly go by that if the product is not clearly awful.

It is changing though: it's possible to get real Italian Parmigiano cheese at the Costco here in Bend, Oregon. Growing up, all I knew of "parmesan cheese" was that green crap that comes in a can, where they were apparently using wood pulp to bulk it up.

EDIT: BTW, this book by Tyler Cowen has some interesting stuff about "why food in the US was so bad": http://amzn.to/2dNxksx

Does a more expensive pastry chef produce more expensive pastry? Or can a more experienced chef produce higher volume also? If the cost of the pastry increases with the cost of the chef, then it's entirely reasonable that there is a lower demand for more expensive pastry and therefore a lower demand for more expensive pastry chefs.

With software development it's a little different - it's entirely possible for a more expensive software developer to produce lower-cost software if the cost savings come from better planning, more fluency with the toolset, and fewer (high-impact) bugs.

There are a number of reasons why wages might not rise that have nothing to do with free market supply and demand.

The most obvious is you could control wages by being the owner of inelastic goods your workers require to live, such as housing. I think this is how the feudal system worked originally, workers produced cereals but the Land and the worker's cottages were both owned by the Landlord. If the price of bread decreased the Landlord could simply increase rents. So it was only when the factories came along that most workers managed to have any savings.

Another example is where a worker in debt, and must work at an existing job to pay for the debt. Obviously a worker without debt is a worker than could request a higher pay rate because they are able to be more competitive by obtaining a new employer.

Another example is the existence of non-compete agreements.

It should not surprise us that in London there exists widespread use of non-competes and their workers are typically indebted by student loans or mortgages, that the wages are so low. Look at any London software engineer thread if you'd like to be depressed, 300-400 a day and sometimes much less, for people with 10+ years of experience.

Another example is that I suspect that there is a conspiracy to hold down wages that involves both the government and companies price fixing. I further suspect this is a deliberate policy by at least the US and UK governments using a list of occupations they depend on to function. Scientists, engineers, programmers.

This shouldn't come as a surprise because even in Silicon Valley where the wages are the highest in the world for computer programmers, it was found that multiple well known corporations were involved in a wage fixing cartel. That however I suspect is merely amateur hour in comparison to the government and its partners.

Not only for the labor, but for the product as well.

I know few people that dislike pastries... ok maybe they like some kinds more than others, but still...

But I know few people that like pastries at any price; at least not with any frequency. Once that price goes up too much they do look for substitute goods. Maybe mass-produces Hostess-style stuff: not great, but sufficient and cheap.

At some point, this too will resolve itself. I think you'll see some mix of price rise and demand reduction in the independent sector (with some labor rate rise, too, but only for the highly skilled) and an increase of demand in the cheap, mass production baked goods area. This will take time to shake out, but it will.

...And I could be wrong in how it will: you cannot plan economies. Not everyone will agree with that, but I have yet to see it happen successfully.

Part of the reason could be the tipping system. It is impossible to raise the price of the food in your restaurant without giving a raise to your waitstaff, since almost everyone tips a fixed percentage. So if you want to give a raise to your chef, you want to fund it with a price increase, but you can't do that without giving a raise to your waiters.