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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don't know if more income means you work harder per se.  I'm a fed gov attorney and I presumably make a lot more than our building's cleaning people, but every time I see them, they're busy emptying trash, cleaning bathrooms, vacuuming, etc.  That seems like much harder work than my somewhat repetitive knowledge job that involves drafting a lot of documents on a computer.

People who make more money often had advantages when they were younger, parents who encouraged educational opportunities, or possibly just even have the drive to seek out career opportunities that pay more.  I agree it's disappointing how far a supposedly high income gets you nowadays, but I would never say I work harder than cleaning people, teachers, nonprofit workers, etc. who may make less than me.[/quote]

Such an Marxian view of what is labor. There are three different concepts here and I am shocked that I have to explain this to someone who is college educated with an advanced degree. First is creation of value, which can take many forms. Physical labor is the most obvious since you are clearly performing some task. However, mental and creative labor also creates value, and often many folds more than physical labor. Just because someone is performing mental/creative labor doesn't make them less "harder working" than someone performing physical labor. Secondly, while there is a direct correlation between someone's well being and the amount of hard work they put in, this correlation is cumulative over the person's life time rather than instantaneous. Someone who took it easy for the last ten years and is working 80 hours a week for the past month is likely less well off than someone who has been consistently working hard for the past ten years but has been on vacation for the past month. This not only applies to work but also effort in school. Therefore you it is ill considered to look at how hard someone is working presently and lament that something is not fair for the poor state of well being that person find him/herself in. Thirdly is the concept of scarcity - that is, the value of someone's work is often directly correlated to the supply and demand of that job function. This means how important a job function is sometimes has little correlation to how well the job pays. This explains why teachers have lower salaries than lawyers even though one would acknowledge that educating the young is a very important, stressful, and demanding job function. The difference between lawyers and teachers is that we place far higher education requirements on lawyers and are highly selective of who we allow to practice law. The bar to become a teacher is set much lower so it is far easier to become a teacher than a lawyer. You want to increase teacher salary, increase the qualifications necessary to become a teacher, the market will take care of the rest.[/quote]

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