This week’s Klawchat transcript is up, and I also reviewed Broom Service, a fun family-strategy boardgame that’s been nominated for the Spiel des Jahres award, for Paste.
And now, this week’s links…
- Why one independent bookstore is offering refunds to customers who bought Go Set a Watchman. Read his reasons, because he’s right – and that’s why I won’t read the book.
- Maybe the best way to convince vaccine-deniers to vaccinate is to explain how scary those diseases can be for children.
- One tweet shows how hopelessly out of touch the privileged can be. In this case, a Google program manager responded to the observation that laundromats were being priced out of San Francisco neighborhoods by calling it “the cost of disruption.” But “disruption” isn’t the same as Schumpeter’s creative destruction; disruption merely skims off the top of the market, the way direct-streaming services are skimming off the best cable/satellite subscribers or Uber and its ilk are skimming off taxi drivers’ businesses. These market changes are complicated and can’t be dismissed as good (or bad) in a few words.
- Gravity Payments announced earlier this year that they were raising their company’s minimum salary to $70,000. Since then, they’ve had to cope with the backlash.
- Another good post on dealing with anxiety, this time from a pseudonymous writer who works for a minor league club.
- A scary medical-mystery story involving a superbug in the UCLA hospital.
- Great piece from Grantland looking at Big Daddy Kane and Rakim and hip-hop nostalgia.
- An interesting theory (in Scientific American) on how Homo sapiens spread throughout the world.
- Jeb Bush isn’t sure if we need to spend $500 million on “women’s health issues,” and The Atlantic has a piece on what that phrase actually means.
It’s both funny and infuriating to watch overpaid CEOs wring their hands about what Dan Price has done in trying to ensure his employees have enough money to enjoy their lives and show up productive and ready to work. CEO pay skyrockets while average worker compensation stagnates even as more and more productivity is squeezed out of employees. Add to that his own business model, which is to prove how outrageous credit card fees have been, and you have the perfect mix for a target on his back. We should all cheer on a man who cares not about bottom lines first and foremost, but about doing a job well and paying people what they’re actually worth. And we should take note of who rails against him the loudest, because they’re the ones who have the most to lose if income inequality slows, stops, or even reverses.
Forget the CEOs. How would you feel if you were making $70k before this decision and all of a sudden people who were less qualified and/or lower performing were making as much as you were. I’ve ready about this business in a few places but I’ve never seen it explained how he increased (or didn’t) compensation for the middle management types. I feel that work simply has to be a meritocracy. If person A is a better performer than person B, person A deserves to be compensated for that.
@Mike: I’m concerned with what other people make only in terms of what it might help me ask for or demand in a future negotiation. Otherwise, I don’t see the point in getting upset over what someone else earns as long as I feel like I’m earning a fair wage for my production.
Keith,
If someone less qualified or less effective than you is earning as much as you are, how can you say you’re earning a fair wage? You always talk about the virtues of being paid for your work on ESPN.com through insider, which I totally agree with. Would you be happy with your earnings if someone who generated 50% of the “clicks” that you do was making the same amount?
I’m not saying the raw dollar value of the salary is the important part…only that a high performer deserves to be paid more than a low performer (whether it’s $70k or $100k or $20k).
The raising of the pay floor does seem to have these consequences in the short term, because any such upheaval is bound to be felt unfair to somebody. But if I worked there and was assured that my individual performance would be rewarded, I think I’d be okay with it. The higher floor would increase pressure on low performers, as it would increase the available replacement population exponentially.
Higher salary floors almost always raise the entire structure, given a little bit of time. Reason being is that, yes, if I am more productive than worker X, I can compare my value to worker X in salary negotiations. And, if I am actually more valuable than worker X, either I will get the raise… or be able to sell my services to another employer, which will cause my current employer to have to rethink his middle range salaries, or lose his more productive employees over time.
This sort of dynamic is actually seen with historic wage increases. There is disruption initially, followed by an increased pay structure all the way through. This is in stark contrast to paying the top earners in a company more… this almost never has any beneifical impact on the lower earners over any length time.
The article on Sillicon Valley was kind of interesting but it mostly missed the point of why these services exist. Uber is a response to the regulatory capture of the taxicab industry. Washio is a response to the lack of laundromats in their neighborhoods.
The article also mentioned something very important but didn’t go into further detail: real estate. The entire bay area has horrible land use policies. San Francisco has so many arcane policies when it comes to real estate development that only luxury-type developments are feasible. The entire region needs to be upzoned in order to accommodate the demand to live there and to keep prices from continuing to explode. San Francisco has responded to by…wanting to stop market-rate construction.