Whether something is reasonably priced doesn't really have a 1-to-1 relationship with whether you can afford it.
I could certainly afford a home. Would it provide the same value that a home did to my ancestors? Probably not. It wouldn't be a good use of my wealth at this time.
> In the 1950s these things were available on a non-college degree wage.
Yet I am being underpaid? Sure, technically speaking, we are all underpaid if you compare things like workforce participation to wages and CPI. None of that really undermines my point that I don't think we should be paid as much as we are for the quality of work we are producing.
You don't have to like it or agree, but no, I refuse to believe that I'm a bad guy for concluding that there's a racket-like quality to the software industry. In politics there are clubs where political performance has little bearing on the distribution of wealth, so why would any other industry necessarily be different?
>Yet I am being underpaid? Sure, technically speaking, we are all underpaid if you compare things like workforce participation to wages and CPI. None of that really undermines my point that I don't think we should be paid as much as we are for the quality of work we are producing.
Except it does...?
Just saying it doesn't doesn't make it true.
>You don't have to like it or agree, but no, I refuse to believe that I'm a bad guy for concluding that there's a racket-like quality to the software industry.
Software engineering isn't a racket.
The reason we're paid middle class wages (unlike, say, teachers) is because:
A) capital controls the stocks and flows of most society's wealth and because
B) we can potentially trigger large increases to productivity so the ceiling on our value add is very very high.
C) there are not enough experienced programmers to satisfy capital's insatiable demand for automation.
These things are relative to one another. The way you present your case that we are all underpaid is very absolutist and lacks the nuance that someone can be underpaid in the grand scheme but overpaid at a smaller scale.
> The reason we're paid middle class wages (unlike, say, teachers) is because:
I don't really have the time to adequately address every one of those reasons, so all I have to say is that if economics were that straight forward and honest then we'd have a lot more millionaires and billionaires. At best, reason B is true absent any sort of incompetence or meaningful quality-control around production. When you consider how the revenue of many companies is not tightly coupled with productivity and profits, your perspective doesn't seem to add up.
>These things are relative to one another. The way you present your case that we are all underpaid is very absolutist
I didn't really disagree that "underpaid/overpaid is relative", I just used a different default frame of reference to you. One that made you angry I guess?
> and lacks the nuance that someone can be underpaid in the grand scheme but overpaid at a smaller scale.
This point sounds horribly confused to me. Earlier you said we are all vastly overpaid. Now we are both underpaid and overpaid? Depending on the scale of... something?
>I don't really have the time to adequately address every one of those reasons, so all I have to say is that if economics were that straight forward and honest then we'd have a lot more millionaires and billionaires.
I really have no idea what you're getting at here. It doesn't make any sense to me.
I could certainly afford a home. Would it provide the same value that a home did to my ancestors? Probably not. It wouldn't be a good use of my wealth at this time.
> In the 1950s these things were available on a non-college degree wage.
Yet I am being underpaid? Sure, technically speaking, we are all underpaid if you compare things like workforce participation to wages and CPI. None of that really undermines my point that I don't think we should be paid as much as we are for the quality of work we are producing.
You don't have to like it or agree, but no, I refuse to believe that I'm a bad guy for concluding that there's a racket-like quality to the software industry. In politics there are clubs where political performance has little bearing on the distribution of wealth, so why would any other industry necessarily be different?