Pun Salad

Why do wages for some jobs go up while others go down? Why do some jobs pay a lot more than others?

The barstool answers you get to those questions tend to emphasize factors such as how difficult, dangerous, or important a job is, how much education is necessary, etc. You tend to get moralistic answers in a lot of cases, answers that attempt to explain why highly paid people deserve to be highly paid.

But none of those answers is true.

Anybody who thinks about it for 10 seconds knows that education, merit, social value, and other factors of that kind have nothing at all to do with earnings. There is no pediatric oncologist walking this earth who makes a dime on the dollar of Joe Rogan’s income, or Taylor Swift’s, or Jimmy Donaldson’s (that’s “MrBeast” to you). Kathy Ireland seems like a very nice lady, and I am sure she is smart and hardworking and jammed to the gills with personal merit of many kinds, but that isn’t why she’s rich—she made half a billion dollars with the job description “Stand there and look pretty.” Rogan and Swift and MrBeast are all bright and hardworking people, I’m sure, but none of them is as bright as the least bright associate professor of physics at MIT, and none of them works as hard as the people who pick tomatoes or throw baggage at the airport or unload cargo ships.

Wages are a price—the price of labor—and prices are determined by supply and demand. That’s it.