The main reason for this is government regulation artificially limiting supply. For example, being a lawyer isn't that hard. You could intern with a lawyer and read books on law yourself and get just as good an education. That's what our founding fathers did. However the lawyers want as few people as possible to enter their profession so they make incredibly stupid requirements for becoming a lawyer, such as having to have an undergrad degree.(which can be for literally anything) Policies like this are horrible because they drive up the cost of both lawyers and school. It also lowers the quality of education because educators are now in a position of unfair power over prospective lawyers since they can say who can and can't practice law.
Which professions are paid too much given their value to society?
21–30 of 42 posts
Re: Which professions are paid too much given their value to society?
#22This thread seems to have few comments on the article and several on the title. It's not an HN survey, it's an article regarding a research paper [1].
IMO -- this kind of data could/should benefit teachers and researchers who want to argue that their benefit to society isn't reflected in the existing high school/undergrad/graduate metrics. Instead of paying teachers/researchers the wage that reflects an equilibrium between available supply and job demand, maybe we could offer something that offsets their (positive) externality. I suppose it only makes sense for public schools since private entities aren't focused on things like this. But there's a lot of debate over public school funding and this seems like a great input to that debate.
Re: Which professions are paid too much given their value to society?
#23Real estate agents (in the USA at least)
As someone who just recently sold FSBO, this rings true to me. Real Estate agents provide an entirely 100% superfluous service especially in relation to the absurd amount of commission they charge. The important aspects of selling a home are done by inspectors, appraisers, and lawyers. The Real Estate agents are basically leeching middlemen that keep as many people out as possible to keep their perceived monopoly, wh…
> real estate agents will only work with other agents and skip over homes that are FSBO
Is it typical in the US for a buyer to have an estate agent too? If so, why? If not, I don't understand what this means.
Where I'm from, typically only the seller would have an estate agent.
Re: Which professions are paid too much given their value to society?
#24An easy example for the opposite question of "Which professions are paid too little given their value to society? ". Hospital nurses in UK, they perform life saving work and paid rubbish money.
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Re: Which professions are paid too much given their value to society?
#25Earlier quoted context omitted.
Before or after overtime? My understanding is that here in Canada most nurses doing shift work make 6 figures. Hospitals are understaffed so there's lots of overtime available, and of course nursing is a 24/7 job. The night shift premium and the overtime premium multiply so picking up a single extra night shift can gross $1000.
Nurses in the U.K. don't get overtime. They can join bank nursing which is like a separate pool of nurses to cover these gaps. Pay is a bit higher but not by much. NHS pay rates are here: https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/about/careers-nhs/nhs-pay-a... Registered nurses are on band 5 and start at the bottom (22k GBP). They move up a point every year. No band 5 nurses in the UK make six figures.
Also to add to this:
- nurses pay around 500 gbp per year for their nursing pin (registration) and union membership, which is required for insurance purposes
- nhs pensions take out a further 7%
Re: Which professions are paid too much given their value to society?
#26Note that GDP is only a proxy for value to society. It's based on what's measurable, not on what's valuable.
Prisons and wars increase GDP but make us worse off. Likewise, many free apps (e.g. Google Maps) significantly improve our lives but don't significantly impact GDP.
This matters because the approach used to measure externalities may undervalue software engineers and teachers and overvalue defense contractors and lobbyists.
Edit: This is really important for software. Software has low marginal cost so the market price (and therefore measured GDP) trends towards 0 but the (mostly unmeasured) consumer surplus is huge.
Another Edit: Note that externalities for defense contractors and lobbyists actually weren't measured here and probably couldn't be reliably measured with this technique due to international differences, but they made great examples for my explanation.
Re: Which professions are paid too much given their value to society?
#27Managers, as a group.
A good manager on the right project can make a huge contribution to that project's success. Ditto a good senior leader running a large organisation. I have no problem with these people being compensated accordingly.
However, many people in management positions aren't particularly good at it, yet still command compensation as if they were.
In far too many cases, a manager is even making their organisation less effective overall than if they just left and let the people doing the work figure something out between them, yet still commanding that high compensation.
Re: Which professions are paid too much given their value to society?
#28It would be interesting to see these results cross-checked, by applying the methods from one job to another - for example by applying the methods used for law and engineering (Cross-country regression of GDP on per capita) to the other fields listed.
Personally I find the results presented surprising - especially the claim of research being worth 25% of GDP, which seems very high to me.
Re: Which professions are paid too much given their value to society?
#29Real estate agents (in the USA at least)
As someone who just recently sold FSBO, this rings true to me. Real Estate agents provide an entirely 100% superfluous service especially in relation to the absurd amount of commission they charge. The important aspects of selling a home are done by inspectors, appraisers, and lawyers. The Real Estate agents are basically leeching middlemen that keep as many people out as possible to keep their perceived monopoly, wh…
"Real Estate agents provide an entirely 100% superfluous service".
While I definitely agree that the amount of money realtors get for selling a home is ridiculously high, the above statement is definitely NOT true (and I've sold several homes through a realtor).
Realty is often a more risky business than people think. People often only focus on the houses that sell quickly, not the ones that sit for a long time. A realtor can invest many hours in selling a home and get nothing if it doesn't sell. I had a home on the market more than a year (and it was a fairly new, nice home at a reasonable price, it was just a bad time to sell). We gave up, and if it had not been for a deal that came up a short while later, my realtor would have gotten nothing for that year's worth of effort (I had negotiated commission with her originally, due to her selling the home I was originally interested in, and I re-negotiated commission on the second deal).
Again, I'm not saying that the commissions aren't too high -- they are. And it is a lucrative business if you want to spend all of your weekends and evenings showing houses. Personally I think it's a good short-term career for young people who are single. Money isn't everything, and I would not even consider doing the job as a married person.
Also, not all realtors are made equal. There are a lot of them that put as little effort as possible into selling your home, and just hope that realtor.com listings will get them a buyer without putting much into it. However, the best realtors do put work into selling your home, and their network and ability to find buyers is of value. I just don't think it is worth what they charge for it. But, then again, given the hours/days they have to work, I guess I'd want to be paid very well if I was doing it.
In some ways it is a bit like doctors (talking about in the U. S. here) -- it takes a long time to go through med school, and many come out up to their necks in debt, so by the time they are done with residency they feel they have earned the high fees they get paid (and/or they just need them so they can get out of debt and finally be profitable). Of course the medical profession is a complicated mess, so there's more to it than that.
Re: Which professions are paid too much given their value to society?
#30Earlier quoted context omitted.
As someone who just recently sold FSBO, this rings true to me. Real Estate agents provide an entirely 100% superfluous service especially in relation to the absurd amount of commission they charge. The important aspects of selling a home are done by inspectors, appraisers, and lawyers. The Real Estate agents are basically leeching middlemen that keep as many people out as possible to keep their perceived monopoly, wh…
> real estate agents will only work with other agents and skip over homes that are FSBO Is it typical in the US for a buyer to have an estate agent too? If so, why? If not, I don't understand what this means. Where I'm from, typically only the seller would have an estate agent.
I just purchased a home. Basically as a buyer the buyer's agent is paid out of the sellers end of the sale. The fee paid to the sellers agent really, but the seller pays in the end.
So... I can not have a buyer's agent and pay for it anyways. Or I can have an agent. The only advantage of having an agent is that getting showings is a little easier and you spend less time on the phone.
Houses have showings on Saturday/Sunday and offers are in on Monday in hot markets. There is no time to negotiate reducing the price in exchange for not using a buyers agent. If you have a complicated offer it might not get selected. People are waving inspection and financing contingencies in some markets.
I think it more or less comes down to buyers and sellers being kind of stupid. Heck... just about everyone I dealt with throughout the process was kind of stupid. The lender (at least the one I finally ended up with) and home inspector were both competent. Everyone else demonstrated they had no idea how to do their job.
I walked into so many houses with rat poop and dead insects everywhere. Houses were priced and bid on with only a weak correlation between the location and quality of the house and what people offered. It's obvious neither the buyers or the sellers knew whether what they were looking at was any good and major deficiencies were not being priced in. A house could be right next to an active commuter rail (not a stop, just the track) and it wouldn't be reflected in the price!