The "Why" in Wage Segregation

[Beet]

This article is a nice little bit of nonsense. What they don't address is that in the mid-20th century, employers didn't price labor naively; labor really was relatively equal in terms of individual productivity. On an assembly line, one person might be able to install 8 widgets an hour while another person might only install 7, but there's not that much difference. In a world where everyone has a subscription to the Washington Post, the marginal productivity of the foreign service bureau really wasn't that much different than the domestic bureaus because everyone bought the same paper, and would have had it delivered no matter what. It's not like today where each individual article drives or fails to drive traffic based on hits. One writer may go viral and get 50k hits, while another struggles for a measly 500. That's a big difference between 8 versus 7 widgets per hour.

In other words, it's not the measurement of productivity that changed, it's the productivity itself that became more unequal.

Which is why things like improving education won't fix the problem (although education in underprivileged areas certainly needs to be improved). The "skilled labor" marketplace is inherently unequal and fails to provide the kind of mass stability and cohesion that the former unskilled labor marketplace did. It is, by its very nature, geared towards winners and losers, often on a large scale. It is not geared for social or individual stability.

My view is that it would be better to invest in higher wages and protections for unskilled service professions. Unionize the Wal-Marts and the McDonald's and the janitors of the nation, and have these jobs pay living wages. The brilliance of the mass manufacturing (or farm) labor was that even a D student could make a good living.

[Beet]

This article is a nice little bit of nonsense. What they don't address is that in the mid-20th century, employers didn't price labor naively; labor really was relatively equal in terms of individual productivity. On an assembly line, one person might be able to install 8 widgets an hour while another person might only install 7, but there's not that much difference. In a world where everyone has a subscription to the Washington Post, the marginal productivity of the foreign service bureau really wasn't that much different than the domestic bureaus because everyone bought the same paper, and would have had it delivered no matter what. It's not like today where each individual article drives or fails to drive traffic based on hits. One writer may go viral and get 50k hits, while another struggles for a measly 500. That's a big difference between 8 versus 7 widgets per hour.

In other words, it's not the measurement of productivity that changed, it's the productivity itself that became more unequal.

Which is why things like improving education won't fix the problem (although education in underprivileged areas certainly needs to be improved). The "skilled labor" marketplace is inherently unequal and fails to provide the kind of mass stability and cohesion that the former unskilled labor marketplace did. It is, by its very nature, geared towards winners and losers, often on a large scale. It is not geared for social or individual stability.

My view is that it would be better to invest in higher wages and protections for unskilled service professions. Unionize the Wal-Marts and the McDonald's and the janitors of the nation, and have these jobs pay living wages. The brilliance of the mass manufacturing (or farm) labor was that even a D student could make a good living.

If this is so, shouldn't we be able to model the current labor situation on that from the 18th or 19th century? In the pre-assembly line era there were also larger differences in productivity, since more of manufacturing depended on personal ability. I would also suggest that there were fairly large differences in productivity in pre-mechanized agriculture. The rates of production between two crop pickers could be quite different, even a factor of two or more. That's much more than the 7 vs 8 widgets of the assembly line.

How could two crop pickers working on the same farm have a very large differential? Two to one would seem to be an upper limit if comparing a young healthy man with an older woman or inexperienced child.

Either way, both farm and assembly line unskilled work had a much lower variation in productivity potential than skilled labor. Of course, capital could and did multiply unskilled productivity, but any machine taken advantage of by one unskilled worker can easily be given to all the others, so in the end there's no firm/farm/level reason to have huge differences in pay scales. With skilled work, the source of the productivity multiplier is with the worker him or herself...

[Beet]

Fair enough.