>while working-class Bangladeshi professionals earn £10,432 less than their white counterparts in the same jobs
I ask this honestly, not attempting to offend, I’m simply curious…but why is it okay to assume negative intention when race/ethnicity is involved. I mean why do I care about this statistic. There’s no nuance here. Discrepancy == bad, per usual.
Hanlon's razor: Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.
Who said anything about intention? If somebody rear-ends my car by accident, they're still responsible for the damage. My insurance company's lawyers don't accept "Oh well I didn't mean to do it" in lieu of payment. Is there a bona-fide reason that the working-class Bangladeshi professionals should be systematically underpaid?
The reason immigrants are allowed to immigrate is because of their willingness to work for lower wages. Whether you think that's fair or not that's the reality.
Agreed. As an immigrant from Hong Kong to UK, I see many people coming to work for minimum wage. Most of them are quite wealthy and just work to feel like being a part of society.
Slavery is far from dead, the modern world is built on the back of slaves (not slaves from a few generations ago, slaves that exist now). It's just very ubiquitous, like the Roman using Lead in everything.
Prevailing wages in poorer areas are going to be lower. Therefore national statistics will show that the same occupation in the poor area earns less than in the rich area. This is all that's going on here.
It's pretty irresponsible of the Guardian not to even interview a single labor economist who can explain this to their readers.
Instead, they interview lawyers and politicians who are denouncing the very mechanisms that lift people out of poverty, because it is by taking advantage of this that wages in poorer areas go up:
If a business had to pay the same wage in the rich and poor area, then there would be no incentive to increase hiring where labor costs are lower, and this is exactly how you bid up wages in those areas.
In order to disentangle potential sources of the class pay gap we next use regression analysis to see how the gap is affected when we adjust for five sets of factors often identified as sources of income inequality. Figure 3, begins by showing (in the first bar) the raw average earnings gap reported in Figure 2, while the second bar shows the average earnings gap in pounds per week when we control for gender, ethnicity, age and hours worked. In the next bar, additional controls for educational attainment are included; then human capital, work context (work region, industry, firm size, public vs private sector) and finally the individual occupation the individual works in.
[..] even when we control for all of these variables, Figure 3 shows that the class pay gap remains substantial and statistically significant (see Appendix Table A10 for standard errors). Thus even when those from working-class backgrounds are similar to those from advantaged backgrounds in every way we can measure, they still face a 7% or £2242 a year pay gap in Britain’s professional and managerial occupations.
At first, I thought you had a good point. But apparently, the study is already exploring this effect.
So, now, the situation is that you have seen a study with results that you don't like, have come up with a reason why the conclusion is invalid without even checking if the conclusion is indeed invalidated by this reason, and used it to reassure yourself and attack the study.
In this case, you are clearly the unscientific irresponsible here.
HN, educate me on this please, why is this wrong or upsetting?
You don't get paid for the work you do, you get paid for how hard it is to replace you, right? Is this not supposed to be the case or is it illegal or immoral (by someone's standards?)?
You have Bob and Jane both C programmers with equal education and experience but Jane's work is many times superior to Bob, so getting someone of the same caliber as Jane will cost more because they can negotiate for more right?
Also, do the same people who get outrages about this also insist that salary negotiation should be a thing of the past? That means a position will pay a fixed amount no matter who is filling it? Meaning the larger a team the more it costs so get what few people you have to work harde and longer right because they all cost the price of the highest performer?
I am not trying to make a point I just want to know what the ideal situation is supposed to be.
I don't have much gripe about pay, I would be happy to get paid the same amount as people with kids and mortgages who can't take any less than a high amount but I certainly don't want to hear other people's salary or tell mine. But it would suck if all the few high paying roles are always taken because of the demand and the majority are much lower paying.
You’re assuming being born into an affluent family is the cause of the higher pay. Is it possible that the employees from affluent families are higher performing?
I assume there’s significant class bias but I think considering only that factor is a little reductive.
Yes, I also support meritocracy as well as critical examination of bias when decisions are made that especially affect a certain group of people. But keep in mind, the merit for jobs is still how hard it would be to get an individual that brings similar value which could be seemingly silly things like attractiveness for sales jobs for example.
In my view, it's a personal confidence thing. People raised in a (UK traditional) working class family are bought up with lower expectations about what success they can enjoy in later life[1], compared to people raised in (traditional) middle class families. They will generally have less educational advantages eg: less pressure to read books, finish homework, do extra-curricular activities, etc. Getting to university will require harder work in a less friendly social environment. So when it comes to work, working class people will (in general) tend to have less confidence to negotiate a wage equivalent to their middle class colleagues doing the same work. Of course there's numerous exceptions to this on an individual level[2], but we're not talking about individuals here.
[1] - anecdotal evidence: despite having an excellent academic record at school, the first question my Careers Advisor asked me was: "So which Regiment are you planning to join?" - which kinda sums up the sort of assumptions people made about me, based on my family's reputation and circumstances.
[2] - me, for instance (I'm ignoring, for the purposes of this comment, the 7 weeks I spent in the Army).
What if you have Steve who is a brilliant C programmer, better even than Jane, but autistic and so unable to negotiate a better salary than either Bob or Jane? Would you find it ethical to pay him less?
Yeah, I do. He still gets hired and shows off his talent, if you don't give him a bug raise to keep him he might look for another job and someone else might look at his resume from the work he did for you and pay him what he deserves. I am speaking as someone that is terrible at negotiating or even talking to strangers.
I usually have no idea what superior and inferior are. A $50 Casio watch is a better timekeeper than a $20,000 Rolex, but it's not really superior is it?
Depends. Are we apples to apples doing the same things and our work is bringing value only through programming, but I don’t like confrontation? Then no. It can of course be that the better negotiator is also a better communicator and acts as some type of team adhesive and then it is a different story.
It is wrong because people are being underpaid for not participating in silly upper class rituals that are not relevant to productivity. Apart from the evident injustice of being poorer because your parents could afford polo lessons, it produces a system of perverse incentives, whereby wearing cufflinks is more important than knowing how to do your job.
There are a few industries in the UK were you’d be better off being a foreigner than a lower class local.
The ideal situation is one where people are judged by the value of their work and not by the socioeconomic background of their parents.
The thing I really don't like about this is tries to categorise people by what ever group the study claims the individual belongs too. They've come up with one magic variable, parents occupation when child was 14.
As usual it's politicians stirring up division for political gain.
Is the the government going to start setting targets for class? The UK FCA already has plans for other "categories" of people (gender and race based). Source (pdf) https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/policy/ps22-3.pdf
I'm worried that we're about to enshrine class in law too.
But the variable they used shows a statistically significant influence.
They could have come up with a variable that is "the first letter of the first name", but then, the result will not show such strong difference between the groups. In other words: if a variable shows strong difference, then this variable is a good choice, and there is a real mechanism below this variable, and classifying people according to this variable corresponds to separating people based on the fact that they, for real, are really different groups that go through really different mechanism. (it does not mean causality, but even in case of confounding variable, it is still a pragmatically good choice of classification)
Then, the question is what are these mechanisms. There are a bunch of hypotheses, for example:
1) society has rewarded people with "efficient gene" to be in high class, so people in high class are naturally better. This is the most naive hypothesis, and it corresponds to a common bias and a lot of studies or observations indicates it is probably at least a very small reality (adopted children, "imposters", ...).
2) higher class family have values and standards that educate their people to try to be better at their jobs. Again, it's a common bias to believe that, but there is no real proof of it (the fact that some people think it's "obvious" is in fact the proof that they are biased).
3) higher class family have access to better school education because of resources. It is unfair, and in a modern society, we should want to compensate for that: everyone should be born with the same opportunity.
4) higher class family have values and standards that educate their people to try to consider themselves as better as the others, to present their skills less honestly and to have less guilt of take the position instead of a more qualified person. Inversely, lower class family have values and standards that educate their people to be more modest than what they really are. If you think that this hypothesis is bullshit but did not think the same as hypothesis 2, then, you are clearly biased: this one is the same under-lying idea (different education), but you prefer the one positive for the higher class.
5) higher class family have better contact and better arguments to get better salary. It is unfair, and in a modern society, we should want to compensate for that: better skilled people should get the job.
6) higher class family have better reputation to get better salary. Similarly to a lot of studies that shows (using blind approaches and scientific methodology) that for two candidates with same skills, the recruiter is unconsciously biased to choose the one that correspond to the caricatural mental picture of who would be an ideal recruitee, recruiters tend to be unconsciously push to believe a candidate would be better if they know this candidate has characteristics that are in fact uncorrelated, such as "coming from this fancy school", "being of higher class", ... I personally think it's difficult to believe this does not has a big impact, because such impact has been observed in plenty of studies in a slightly different context (gender or race, for example). Also, it explains why the "imposters" works as it does ("imposters" = people from working class that have pretended to be higher class)
7) ...
The variable does not imply anything on those mechanisms, but it does not need it to still separate into groups that are, indeed, subject to different treatment.
29 comments
[ 4.0 ms ] story [ 38.8 ms ] threadI ask this honestly, not attempting to offend, I’m simply curious…but why is it okay to assume negative intention when race/ethnicity is involved. I mean why do I care about this statistic. There’s no nuance here. Discrepancy == bad, per usual.
Who said anything about intention? If somebody rear-ends my car by accident, they're still responsible for the damage. My insurance company's lawyers don't accept "Oh well I didn't mean to do it" in lieu of payment. Is there a bona-fide reason that the working-class Bangladeshi professionals should be systematically underpaid?
It's pretty irresponsible of the Guardian not to even interview a single labor economist who can explain this to their readers.
Instead, they interview lawyers and politicians who are denouncing the very mechanisms that lift people out of poverty, because it is by taking advantage of this that wages in poorer areas go up:
If a business had to pay the same wage in the rich and poor area, then there would be no incentive to increase hiring where labor costs are lower, and this is exactly how you bid up wages in those areas.
“Class groups including “working-class” are based on parental occupation aged 14”
[1] https://departmentforopportunities.org/news/the-class-pay-ga...
https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
4.3 Explaining the Class Pay Gap
In order to disentangle potential sources of the class pay gap we next use regression analysis to see how the gap is affected when we adjust for five sets of factors often identified as sources of income inequality. Figure 3, begins by showing (in the first bar) the raw average earnings gap reported in Figure 2, while the second bar shows the average earnings gap in pounds per week when we control for gender, ethnicity, age and hours worked. In the next bar, additional controls for educational attainment are included; then human capital, work context (work region, industry, firm size, public vs private sector) and finally the individual occupation the individual works in.
[..] even when we control for all of these variables, Figure 3 shows that the class pay gap remains substantial and statistically significant (see Appendix Table A10 for standard errors). Thus even when those from working-class backgrounds are similar to those from advantaged backgrounds in every way we can measure, they still face a 7% or £2242 a year pay gap in Britain’s professional and managerial occupations.
So, now, the situation is that you have seen a study with results that you don't like, have come up with a reason why the conclusion is invalid without even checking if the conclusion is indeed invalidated by this reason, and used it to reassure yourself and attack the study.
In this case, you are clearly the unscientific irresponsible here.
You don't get paid for the work you do, you get paid for how hard it is to replace you, right? Is this not supposed to be the case or is it illegal or immoral (by someone's standards?)?
You have Bob and Jane both C programmers with equal education and experience but Jane's work is many times superior to Bob, so getting someone of the same caliber as Jane will cost more because they can negotiate for more right?
Also, do the same people who get outrages about this also insist that salary negotiation should be a thing of the past? That means a position will pay a fixed amount no matter who is filling it? Meaning the larger a team the more it costs so get what few people you have to work harde and longer right because they all cost the price of the highest performer?
I am not trying to make a point I just want to know what the ideal situation is supposed to be.
I don't have much gripe about pay, I would be happy to get paid the same amount as people with kids and mortgages who can't take any less than a high amount but I certainly don't want to hear other people's salary or tell mine. But it would suck if all the few high paying roles are always taken because of the demand and the majority are much lower paying.
In my view the ideal situation would still be a meritocracy but it would not be predicated on who you know or the old school tie.
I assume there’s significant class bias but I think considering only that factor is a little reductive.
[1] - anecdotal evidence: despite having an excellent academic record at school, the first question my Careers Advisor asked me was: "So which Regiment are you planning to join?" - which kinda sums up the sort of assumptions people made about me, based on my family's reputation and circumstances.
[2] - me, for instance (I'm ignoring, for the purposes of this comment, the 7 weeks I spent in the Army).
There are a few industries in the UK were you’d be better off being a foreigner than a lower class local.
The ideal situation is one where people are judged by the value of their work and not by the socioeconomic background of their parents.
Is the the government going to start setting targets for class? The UK FCA already has plans for other "categories" of people (gender and race based). Source (pdf) https://www.fca.org.uk/publication/policy/ps22-3.pdf
I'm worried that we're about to enshrine class in law too.
They could have come up with a variable that is "the first letter of the first name", but then, the result will not show such strong difference between the groups. In other words: if a variable shows strong difference, then this variable is a good choice, and there is a real mechanism below this variable, and classifying people according to this variable corresponds to separating people based on the fact that they, for real, are really different groups that go through really different mechanism. (it does not mean causality, but even in case of confounding variable, it is still a pragmatically good choice of classification)
Then, the question is what are these mechanisms. There are a bunch of hypotheses, for example:
1) society has rewarded people with "efficient gene" to be in high class, so people in high class are naturally better. This is the most naive hypothesis, and it corresponds to a common bias and a lot of studies or observations indicates it is probably at least a very small reality (adopted children, "imposters", ...).
2) higher class family have values and standards that educate their people to try to be better at their jobs. Again, it's a common bias to believe that, but there is no real proof of it (the fact that some people think it's "obvious" is in fact the proof that they are biased).
3) higher class family have access to better school education because of resources. It is unfair, and in a modern society, we should want to compensate for that: everyone should be born with the same opportunity.
4) higher class family have values and standards that educate their people to try to consider themselves as better as the others, to present their skills less honestly and to have less guilt of take the position instead of a more qualified person. Inversely, lower class family have values and standards that educate their people to be more modest than what they really are. If you think that this hypothesis is bullshit but did not think the same as hypothesis 2, then, you are clearly biased: this one is the same under-lying idea (different education), but you prefer the one positive for the higher class.
5) higher class family have better contact and better arguments to get better salary. It is unfair, and in a modern society, we should want to compensate for that: better skilled people should get the job.
6) higher class family have better reputation to get better salary. Similarly to a lot of studies that shows (using blind approaches and scientific methodology) that for two candidates with same skills, the recruiter is unconsciously biased to choose the one that correspond to the caricatural mental picture of who would be an ideal recruitee, recruiters tend to be unconsciously push to believe a candidate would be better if they know this candidate has characteristics that are in fact uncorrelated, such as "coming from this fancy school", "being of higher class", ... I personally think it's difficult to believe this does not has a big impact, because such impact has been observed in plenty of studies in a slightly different context (gender or race, for example). Also, it explains why the "imposters" works as it does ("imposters" = people from working class that have pretended to be higher class)
7) ...
The variable does not imply anything on those mechanisms, but it does not need it to still separate into groups that are, indeed, subject to different treatment.