I believe you're still misunderstanding the issue. A good fraction of engineers count among those whose lives build something and help people. Engineers who build user-facing products are still vastly underpaid relative to rent-seekers, like hedge fund managers and CFOs.
Consider the fact that tech has rampant age discrimination because almost no one wants to pay any extra for experience beyond ten years or so unless that person moves to management.
I think Stephen Colbert explained it best in his recent book, America Again. Being close to money attracts more money. Or as Piketty explained it, capital is valued higher than labor. Roles dealing with how capital is allocated are given undue benefits.
>"I believe you're still misunderstanding the issue. A good fraction of engineers count among those whose lives build something and help people. Engineers who build user-facing products are still vastly underpaid relative to rent-seekers, like hedge fund managers and CFOs."
The alternative explanation for this phenomenon is that we all choose different blends of monetary and non-monetary remuneration, according to our skills and desires. Some may derive great joy from helping others, and accept lower pay for this; others may eschew the socially rewarding jobs in favor of occupations which provide financial security for their families.
Actually, the guy who can ensure those rail tracks get repaired does have a ton of leverage, and reaps the reward.
It's not just the guy who pulls out a broken rail and nails a new one in place. Finding someone to do that isn't hard or expensive. It's the guy who knows who will do that for a competitive price in a timely (urgent) manner, can ensure such guys are available to thousands of miles of track, has enough replacement track on hand & well-situated, owns (or can rent) equipment to move such long heavy rails to where needed fast, has personnel handling all the QA & regulatory burdens to ensure those rails won't likely fail soon after installation, etc etc etc; few people are willing & capable of pulling all that off. Rail replacement also includes paying some to do "BS jobs" which those with the money & responsibility know are needed, even if seem largely pointless or distasteful to most casual observers. And yes there's some abuse buried in all that; human nature is far from perfect.
I didn't fully appreciate how some earn their keep until I joined a startup. Organizing productivity demands talent and risk, without which (and obtained/retained by salary) very little resembling corporate productivity would happen. Yes, swinging a hammer is valuable; knowing who should swing it, where, when, and to what purpose - moreso.
What I find fascinating is that I feel a strong desire to respond to your statement, write out a long comment (which I've done and posted earlier on in this thread) explaining how I disagree, only to realize that it's really hard to get anywhere when our disagreement is so fundamental and complex.
I stopped to think where we disagree fundamentally, and I think it boils down to this:
Our technological, social, and economic developments, I believe, have led to crazy increases in wealth and comfort, and I suppose happiness too, at least in the West, but arguably even globally. I think we more or less agree on that.
I think we are also in agreement in many ways we're better off than we have been in the past.
We are somewhat less in agreement over the cause of this, and I suppose that could be a worthwhile conversation. I'm inclined to believe capitalism played some role in this, but that, from a 'social evolutionary' perspective, it's become, or turning into a malignant growth. I'd say technological developments play a much bigger role, and perhaps capitalism was just a mechanism that 'worked' to enable this. But I'm by no means certain of that, and it seems to me that there's no way to get anywhere on this subject other than sustained conversation where we move down to our most basic 'axioms' step by step.
Where I am more certain, and where I suspect we agree least, is whether the status quo is 'good enough' and by extension worth defending or 'fighting'.
I think it's not worth defending too much, primarily because I strongly believe that should be no reason whatsoever for us to be working as much and as hard as we do now. The 'general' increase in wealth and comfort pales in comparison to what would be possible if we had a fairer system in place, and I believe it is absolutely worth the effort to take a shot at creating such a fairer system. I think we've learned at least something from the past, and that we won't attempt to just implement a full totalitarian redistribution scheme.
And even if there's a significant risk of our efforts turning into another 'failed utopia', merely the rising social instability and the (I'd say) well-proven disastrous ecological developments are reason enough for me to take that risk rather than making some small incremental changes to our current system.
However, that would be outside of the confines of the discussion in this thread, and that's quite frustrating.
I guess what I'm saying is that without considering these more fundamental disagreements, our collective discussions in this thread are bound to frustrate and not really significantly 'shape' or change our views.
That said, I enjoy reading your views and I mostly just felt like writing this; it's not something 'aimed' at you in particular!
Sure if he's one of a very few people who can do it. If not, there might be someone who's willing to do it for a bit less and his leverage disappears fast.
Leverage comes at the intersection of "benefits lots" and "can be done by few".
It can't be that simple though. In general rent-seeking can be very lucrative, as can be positioning yourself between a good/service what funds it.
Example: American physicians are not generally more effective than French physicians, but they are vastly better paid. Far more so than can be explained by any linear relationship like hours worked, and far more than any impact analysis would suggest. Many examples in, e.g. finance exist as well.
The government enforces a quota on medical positions, enrollments and whatnot in the US, which artificially limits the supply of physicians, thereby increasing their wages. In the past hundred years or so, for instance, while the US population increased by 284%, the number of medical schools declined by 26%, to only 123[3].
Some references, one from the right[1] and one from the left[2].
Again, that is just one (partial) mechanism by which the comment I was responding fails to capture what is really going on in practice. The details aren't important, it was just one example.
Another way to put it would be "do work that scales". It's fine to do work that helps one person, but great if you do work that helps a thousand or a million.
Looking at society in its whole, I've always thought that the category that makes the most money are the "middle men". If you put yourself between many producers and many consumers, and take a small cut of every transaction, then you get rich quickly. We have example like VISA/Mastercard, the movie distributors, and many more. I guess these are what he calls "bullshit jobs". Even CEOs fall here: they connect thousands of workers to millions of customers (in a way).
I think the article refers to "helping others." Surely the majority of young bright coders working on checkout systems, social apps, collecting data and learning consumer habits may have a lot of leverage, but whether that's used to help people is very debatable. You could even say they're doing the opposite, helping people accumulate debt over things they didn't really need.
This is why we are so highly paid. We can put in 1 unit of work and enable checkout for all of Amazon, for instance.
Also: 1) supply and demand and 2) rewarding jobs pay less than shitty ones (all of finance in my opinion)