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The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

seths.blog

111–120 of 245 posts

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#111

> (Aside: should the guys who drive an armored car that carries millions of dollars in bonds get paid more than the guys that drive an armored car that only carries thousands of dollars in cash? Does the amount of money handled change the difficult of the work?) Aside from the bigger point of the article, what a horrible analogy. Yes, of course handling more money makes your work more "difficult", where any reasonabl…

A bigger bounty means the bad guys can employ more expensive ways to get the truck. If you use the armored truck that transports thousands of dollars to transport millions of dollars, you're asking to get robbed, because the truck only costs "thousands of dollars" to rob.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#112
post #85
post #18

> After a million dollars or so in salary, the absolute amount that a person is paid has no real impact on their life. They can't eat more meals in a day or wear more shoes. What matters to the manager is the relative amount. Sure, nobody needs more than a million dollars in annual compensation (in 2024 dollars), but relative amount gets you to your never need to work again number faster or slower. You might still wo…

I think this over-estimates the amount required to live a luxurious life in perpetuity. Consider the case of someone wishing to live a luxury lifestyle in the trendy lower east side neighborhood of manhattan. We'll use a 1300 sqft 3 bedroom condo as a baseline. https://www.redfin.com/NY/New-York/455-FDR-Dr-10002/unit-B30... This condo will cost 8k/month with a 20% downpayment at todays interest rates, leaving our hyp…

Further, this assumes that a person's primary financial goals are based on personal consumption, when a person might much more highly value their ability to contribute to their community and finance projects that improve the quality of life of those around them, or maybe they have a particular goal for society in general that they want to pursue, like funding a research project. Many wealthy people don't focus on personal consumption at all, even living frugally, but care about the wider impact of their money.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#113
post #88

Wow, people used to nearly worship Seth Godin, it's pretty refreshing to see a whole lot of disdain for this article here :-) I think there's something to his point about marketing. There probably is a way for companies to pay a little less but still attract the top talent by selling the job better. But then, why hasn't anyone figured this out and started doing it? Maybe financial workers, CEO's, laywers, and enginee…

> it's pretty refreshing to see a whole lot of disdain for this article here :-)

This is Hacker News. World peace and Star Trek-style wealth and post-scarcity could be achieved and we'd still have an overwhelmingly negative Hacker News comment section nitpicking the way peace was achieved, or lamenting that life was better with poverty and the threat of war.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#114

After aging I'm starting to have new views on large salaries: 1. The money is just going to be saved. Net gain to the person is they're probably going to live for the rest of their life off dividends. Net gain to society, is any money taken out of circulation fights inflation. 2. If you pay someone a lot of money they will, essentially, spend it on other people. Either through salary or just buying shit. The richest…

This is "trickle down economics" you're repeating. That theory has failed to provide any empirical evidence.

1. Inflation is good, deflation is bad and out of order high inflation is bad. Unless you literally store cash, you're not taking money out of the system. It's either invested or lended. Your point #1 is completely false.

2. Rich people don't create the middle class, and create only a very small set of people wealthier... if any at all.

There are diminishing returns for society of having exceptionally rich people.

As an example: mathematically having a few people in a town earn more than 100x the rest will not boost the economy as much, as having a distributed rise in compensation.

In our current world what you pay for services and products is not at all dependent on your income. Which means that an average American software engineer earning 150k will still pay $1k for an iPhone, $200 for gardening services and so on. That is the same price anyone else is paying... This leads to diminishing wealth redistribution, as the denominator is how often a service or product is purchased.

Our household income is within the range of 500k, we consume the same products and services as our teacher neighbors at less than half that income.(they probably consume more, given that they have 3 kids)

If our household income goes to $1mil - we will not need to call the gardener more often, we will not eat more, we'll not need more haircuts, we will increase our expenses but not double them.

If our household income goes from $1mil to $10mil, there will be even lower increase in spending that would distribute the income...

Now if every house in our neighborhood got a $100k annual raise, the demand for services and products would go up 100 fold.

3. It's not a zero sum-game. It's a case of diminishing returns. It's interesting that you present a mass market product as an example, where wealth is produced by mass market, instead of an example of rich people making other people wealthy.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#115
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The idea here is that they did the work up front and then saved to accumulate wealth which they could spend later. Is that immoral to you?

Yes. If you work for 10 years and then just consume stuff for the rest of your life without lifting a finger, stuff for which other people work all day long to produce it while at the same time probably not enjoying a quality of life anywhere near yours, that is deeply unjust and I consider it immoral to desire such a life.

But what if I inherited it?

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#116

It's pretty absurd of him to talk about how it's ridiculous that people are paid $50mil (I agree) then pivot and say that $120,000 per annum for a new grad is another example of "ridiculous comp." These things are not in the same ballpark, they are qualitatively different. I don't know the author but this is so bizarre it makes me question their analysis overall.

Brings articles like this to mind: https://www.sfgate.com/local/article/under-100k-low-income-s...

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#117
post #92

The argument that "no one really needs more than $X" is always a flawed one, in my opinion. I don't make $1 M a year, but if I did, I'm absolutely certain I'd prefer $2M a year. I can imagine all sorts of things I'd want -- vacation homes, fancy private schools for children, whatever. At $1 M a year I'd end up doing things that put me in contact with people who make more than me, and I'd think "oh, that's pretty cool…

Good economists don't talk about needs vs. wants, it's all wants because anyone can argue just about anything is a want and not a need. You need food, but if you ask for anything more than beans and rice, that food is now a want. Really? No, we aren't going to play that game. You want food. You want a place to live. You want transportation. It's all wants.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#118
post #18

> After a million dollars or so in salary, the absolute amount that a person is paid has no real impact on their life. They can't eat more meals in a day or wear more shoes. What matters to the manager is the relative amount. Sure, nobody needs more than a million dollars in annual compensation (in 2024 dollars), but relative amount gets you to your never need to work again number faster or slower. You might still wo…

This, I can't believe all these "money doesn't bring you happiness after a certain level" tropes keep ignoring saving and investing angle, just lazy. Or accumulating wealth for your kids.

My personal pet peeve is how every retirement calculator bakes in an assumption like “you’ll NEED 75% of your current income as living expenses when you retire.”

Like your salary won’t change over your career. Like you’re just an impulse buyer. Like there’s anything but a distant correlation between these numbers.

I think there’s a conspiracy or a (USA) cultural aversion to not working.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#119
post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I did not say that they did not work for their salaries.

You did. Not directly, but you implied it.

Okay, I see how can read it like that. What I meant is that consuming after you stopped working for it is immoral, or alternatively earning so much that you can keep consuming but stop working.

Re: The myth of big salaries (it's all marketing)

#120
post #11

> After a million dollars or so in salary, the absolute amount that a person is paid has no real impact on their life. They can't eat more meals in a day or wear more shoes There is more to life than food and shoes? This is one of the dumbest things I’ve read.

The point still stands. Beyond some amount the absolute amount of money really stops to matter

According to whom? The research I've seen on this confirms Bernoulli's intuition that happiness scales with the logarithm of income.

Sure, the logarithm is slowly varying in the limit, but that seems like a very unusual definition of both "beyond some amount" and "absolute amount stops mattering."

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