In Silicon Valley wages are down for everyone but the top 10 percent
This article is terrible:> Tech companies are spending a large portion of their capital toward paying a limited number of research and development staff to design new products and software, but not toward maintenance and service staff like factory and maintenance workersThe entire article and everyone it quotes then proceed to argue that this wealth should be redistributed downwards.This is not just unfair - it will also never work. Because some roles (like "low-skilled maintenance and factory work") have far more candidates than openings, while other roles (like high-skilled engineering) have the opposite supply/demand curve.Now, suppose every single company starts artificially inflating the wages of low-skilled roles, and suppressing the wages for high-skilled roles, to keep everyone "equal" just like this article suggests. What will happen?Nobody will invest the huge amount of time and effort required to become engineers, since that investment won't pay off. Why waste 4 expensive years in college, if I can get the same pay as a janitor, straight out of highschool and without the student debt?All tech companies will become desperately starved for high-skilled talent. Eventually, one of these companies will realize it can fill its many vacancies by decreasing the wages for the low-skilled work (with huge surplus of candidates, it will still have plenty to choose from) and increasing the wages for high-skilled work, where candidates are scarce. This company will fill all its openings, poach the best engineers, increase its profits, and destroy its competition. At that point, all other companies will have to increase high-skilled pay to match... And we'll be back where we are right now.In fact, that's how we got here in the first place.