While harboring no love for the fed or their constituent parts, sometimes their articles are factually accurate. Presently then, the only issue here is that we have an economy overfinancialized amongst large amounts of debt, where successful men are too often those who are most efficient at procuring government guarentees.
While ill admit I was popping off without cause last night, I think you are glossing over a few glaring examples. The entire military industrial complex is plagued by this behavior; despite spending more than the next several countries combined and invading several countries to protect "american interests", the world is a less safe place for americans than it was in the 90s, and we have managed to discard a 20 year lead in military technology for a 5 year disadvantage to international competitors. Institutional atrophy is on full display in the auto industry, which along with the airlines fit the criteria of zombie companies, neither are interested in innovation anymore because their market positions are guarenteed by government regulation and the promise of bailouts. Lastly, the most successful at political maneuvering often end up in government themselves, trading the stocks of companies they themselves are regulating, collecting royalties for drugs they approve, enjoying handsomely paying speaking gigs in exchange for their decades of service to their doners.
Yes, then there is tech, and it often does prove to pay the best for high skilled work like software development, and thats great. Lets not forget before google, samsung, and microsoft had cloud storage, there was another semi-popular cloud storage company whos owner was raided and placed on house arrest for years. Nor should we forget that companies like twitter were taking government bribes to engage in censorship. Its not like everything thats happened in tech has been a product of the free market, there is quite a bit of government help thats helped solidify the market dominance of certain tech companies.
"Positive" refers to positive correlation, not positive effects or desirability.
Those that believe that "high-ability workers" made themselves, that market valuation of a person is fair and reflects what that person deserves, will also view this positive correlation as positive.
Those that see otherwise, e.g. that grok the Matthew Effect[1], systemic prejudice in society, that no human created themselves, or that humans should not be "priced" like commodities, will not. As the paper points out:
There is sorting everywhere in the economy:
- Wealthier, more educated, more attractive men on average marry wealthier, more educated, more attractive women.
- Higher-income households reside in distinct neighborhoods and send their children to better schools than low-income households.
- Elite universities enroll the most qualified undergraduates.
Those that see otherwise, e.g. that grok the Matthew Effect[1], systemic prejudice in society, that no human created themselves, or that humans should not be "priced" like commodities, will not.
Even believing those things, why would you not still see it as positive? Would it be better if high-performing people worked for lower-performing companies? Wouldn't an inability for higher-performing workers to move to higher-performing companies reflect a lack of worker freedom?
Because it’s unfair, most of what determines if a person can become a high performing worker is determined by luck outside the control of this person. I’m currently on a work trip in India, and it’s very obvious how much luck determines your life.
Sure, it's 95% luck, the other 5% can be influenced by hard work. That 5% determines how successful you'll be compared to others with the same amount of luck. It's like being handed a lottery ticket. If you don't work hard to cash it, you're left with nothing.
I think it is important to remember that lot of that "luck" is someone else's work and sacrifice, and I think that is true the world round.
Most luck you or I have wouldn't exist is if someone close to us decided to coast or fuck up instead of making sure to cash keep cashing in those lottery tickets every day
I actually do think it would be great if we didn’t have so much IQ concentration in so many rather niche, high-competition, low-impact-on-daily-life arenas. A lot of these people are competing in zero-sum games where their intelligence is all but canceled because of one another.
If we could take half the 120+ IQ folks working at high frequency trading firms or on online advertisements and scatter them to work in local trade businesses, restaurants, civil services, etc, I think it’d be a net positive.
This. So much brain-waste in professions that generate little to no value for society. How many highly intelligent people waste their lives as lawyers doing endless corporate lawsuits or minority shareholder lawsuits or whatever other useless court proceedings? Society could allocate the resources spent on stuff like that to train more engineers or researchers.
Or accounting, so many highly intelligent people spending years navigating endless mazes of occult tax law or useless bureaucratic nothingburgers who could otherwise be engineers or researchers.
How is it that society is preferentially allocating resources to creating lawyers rather than engineers or researchers? It seems to me that people chose to become lawyers, engineers, or researchers of their own free will. Sure, many researchers are government funded, so you could draw more people to that field with more resources, but I'm not seeing how society is pushing people into law over engineering at least.
Like another commenter suggested, money. These professions are generally rather high paying and come with quite a bit of prestige. "Lawyer" is listed up there with doctor with the stereotypical aspirational jobs.
Sure, I guess I’m conflating society with government. Yeah, doctors and lawyers make more money than other professions, but those incomes are a result of innumerable positive and negative incentives (eg, cost of education, opportunity cost of education, work/life balance, “meaningfulness”). It seems nearly impossible to intentionally modify those incentives in a specific direction without causing unintended consequences elsewhere.
Example: society wants more quality teachers, so society chooses to increase the federal education budget to increase teacher salaries. Consequently, more highly educated people choose to become teachers, however, this unintentionally exacerbates the doctor shortage and further increases corporate lawyer salaries due to decreased supply of lawyers.
I dont think i get your point. you view tech as low-impact, then offer restaurants or civil cervices as an alternative? why are those higher impact?
for what it is worth, IQ of 120 is pretty tame e.g. 1 in 10 people and I think there are lots of smart people that DO work in trades, restaurants, and civil services. I am friends with many .
If I am an HFT engineer, making a faster trading platform literally has very little impact. It doesn't create any value, it just moves value from the slower guy to the faster guy. Then all the HFT companies hire smarter engineers and all improve their latency just as much, and there is literally zero impact to society.
I get the zero sum part, it is the other part that was less clear to me. Eg having an iq 120 dmv teller or server at brunch or
But then again, I disagree with your premise that these other careers are intelligence starved - some of my smartest friends do them.
I think rather those careers are simply more stifling and less creative. That is to say your HFT seems flashy because they are doing novel work in a developing area. If they were in the civil service, they probably wouldn't be reinventing the wheel, but just an efficient bureaucrat.
Obviously people sort on intelligence into different industries. You’re looking at a paper on similar/probably-mostly-identical sorting happening between specific firms.
I don’t believe everyone working in e.g. food service is dumb (nor that everyone working in adtech or HFT is smart), only that the distribution is probably quite extremely uneven.
There is plenty of space for creativity and novel thinking within bureaucracies, trades, service industries, etc., and that is exactly the reason it’d be great to have a more even distribution of smart people into them.
An efficient bureaucrat can navigate themselves to the right place to make a huge amount of impact on people’s actual daily lives at scale. That’s a good thing!
HFT provides liquidity, makes markets more efficient, prices more accurate and narrows spreads. Moving money around as accurately as possible increases the accuracy of allocating funds where they should be. Everything in the World and economy is connected. Accurate prices, efficient trading conditions allow for better allocation of funds on targets worthwhile pursuing.
On the whole you can think that there's Company A and Company B, where both produce different amounts of value. There's an optimal state of how much each company should be funded in order for optimal value production from both together. The more accurate you are with allocating funds the best are the gains.
It's zero sum within the system. The existence of HFT as a whole is positive sum, though I agree that the compensation differential attributed to it outclasses that sum by a large measure.
The existence of HFT definitely is a net positive, but I think it's a tough argument to say that further latency reduction still has any real positive offshoot, so I'd say that it's now as a whole in a zero-sum regime - anyone winning, on the margin, only makes them profit as much as someone else is losing, whereas earlier you could say that tighter spreads and more liquidity helps other market participants.
> it's a tough argument to say that further latency reduction still has any real positive offshoot
There’s an element of Feinman’s spinning, wobbling plates [1]. The problems one must solve to push latency ever lower have knock-on effects.
> whereas earlier you could say that tighter spreads and more liquidity helps other market participants
The guarantee of being nipped curtails entire classes of dirty behaviour. Chunking out an order is smart, but it wasn’t always done. HFT, in this model, serves an adversarial regulatory function.
We also have the basic fact that, in a Ricardian sense, folks are trading with that HFT shop over their slower competitors. At some infinitesimal level, the counterparty chose (and was delivered on) that preference.
I don’t think someone choosing an available preference is de facto validation that the preference was made available by anything close to a globally optimal allocation of resources.
Of course I’m suspicious of any system that claims to be able to globally optimize in this way, but I do think it’d be better for almost everyone if we could.
I didn’t say tech, nor did I suggest there aren’t intelligent (sometimes even extremely intelligent) people working in trades etc. Nor do I think we need supergeniuses working at restaurants.
What I’m suggesting is that we shouldn’t have, increasingly, one end of our economy operated largely by 90-110 IQ folks and one end operated largely by 120+ IQ folks. Especially when the end operated by the 90-110 folks is the one that 99% of people are actually interacting with on a daily basis and when the 120+ IQ end has a propensity to produce extremely intense, near-zero sum competitions that drive the net value of their intelligence to near-zero.
That wasn't what I meant. I mainly meant that it wasnt particularly rare, and as a result, there are tons of people with 120+ IQ in all sorts of roles. The baseline is 10% and because sorting isnt perfect, my priors would lead me to guess that large numbers in most occupations.
>If so, I beg to differ; coming first in a race of 10 people is a huge differentiator of abilities
IQ, by its very nature, doesnt shed much light on comparative performance. I would say there are big differences top to bottom, but you probably wouldnt be able to tell the difference in ability between the 1st and 2nd person out of 10.
> Would it be better if high-performing people worked for lower-performing companies?
Per my value system, what we want is to match people to work that they are good at, and for any particular ability, we want to match people who have more ability to societal needs that are more important. "Higher performing company" does not equate to "more important company". I'm glad Einstein chose to be a physicist rather than be a Facebook engineer (or whatever the equivalent was in his time). I don't believe anyone should be billionaires or fabulously wealthy, but if I did, it would be people like Einstein, not Mark Zuckerberg, or people like Musk who would have paid Einstein some minimal market-driven amount more than Princeton would have (from the government subsidies Must gets) while convincing people he (Musk) is responsible for all the great technological advances resulting from Einstein's work, keeping all the profits for himself and pouring them into even more extractive schemes.
> Wouldn't an inability for higher-performing workers to move to higher-performing companies reflect a lack of worker freedom?
Doesn't the inability of lower-performing workers to not be coerced into working for slave wages under slave conditions represent a lack of freedom? What about the children of lower-performing workers who are locked into poorer schools, poorer nutrition, poorer environments, less quality time with their parents and many other disadvantages?
And what if higher-performing companies are those that are best at extracting the most value out of bottom-level workers, effectively acting as intermediate slave owners for consumers who get cheap goods on the backs of bottom-level workers and their lack of freedom?
> Higher-income households reside in distinct neighborhoods and send their children to better schools than low-income households.
But state and federal funding supplements local tax school funding to achieve approximately equal funding per pupil, and the US is 4th in the world (behind only Luxembourg, Norway, and Iceland) in per-student primary education spending [1]. So what makes those schools "good"?
Based on my admittedly small sample size: involved parents who “give a shit” (and have time and resources to do so).
We’re in Cambridge, MA (one high school for the entire city). I bet the correlations among parents’ academic achievement, household income, parental involvement, and kids’ scholastic accomplishment are all positive or strongly positive. (There cannot be a difference in school, being only one.)
The success traits that put high income earners together gets reenforced with their kids. Move this group (and remove existing students) to a less funded school and they will do better than the kids who got moved to a high funded school. You can't buy parents, social pressures and genes.
2/3 of your metrics are fully accounted for by disposable income differences, the other by free time difference. Advantages accumulate; you’ve discovered privilege. It’s generational. Good job.
Funding is obviously a bullshit metric because per-student spending adjusted PPP in many developing countries's private school systems is a fraction of that in the US and those students start farther behind and end farther in front.
Why should an arbitrary child whose parents are paying 100,000 INR in India end up with better start to finish improvement over an arbitrary child in the US whose government is spending $17,000? Here are the numbers adjusted to match:
100,000 INR converts to $1,202
India's PPP coefficient is 3.5x
Therefore, 100,000 INR is equivalent to $4,200 in the US.
A quarter of the spending and the start-to-finish delta is much higher there. The reason we can't do that here is multifaceted, but maybe the answer is looking to how their schools do it.
Sorting went up for men but down for women? I'm not sure I want to start a DEI fight but I'm also not sure I can think of another answer. EDIT: part time work, apparently.
> Sorting and Wage Inequality: Stronger sorting contributes to wage inequality. High-skill workers employed by highly productive firms tend to earn substantially more, while low-skilled workers at less productive firms earn less.
This is not wage inequality because these are not equal things. More productive employees are not equal to less productive ones. Productive men are not equal to less productive (article's words not mien) women. If 2 different things are not equal, then there is no inequality.
> Therefore, stronger sorting contributes to widening the gap between high and low earners.
The gap between labor and labor is insignificant compared to the gap between labor and capital.
> This is not wage inequality because these are not equal things. More productive employees are not equal to less productive ones. Productive men are not equal to less productive (article's words not mien) women. If 2 different things are not equal, then there is no inequality.
The paper is saying that higher-earning men are more likely to work for companies which pay higher wages (to all their employees). Put another way, 100 men who are equally high-earning across their work experience are not randomly distributed in high- and low- wage companies, but are more concentrated in high-wage companies.
In the HN context, maybe it makes sense to say "higher-earning men are more likely to get jobs at FAANG rather than earn the same amount at Microsoft/some non-OpenAI startup/a bank".
Papers like this miss so much. There are so many other factors that can cause workers with the same abilities to wind up with very different salaries. Some workers might not be able to move to accept a better position so they wind up stuck in a lower paying job. Some are better at negotiation. Some have nepotistic connections to their employers, or got into the right old-boy network in college, so they are overpaid. Some lack self-confidence to ask for what they are worth, so since employers don't pay more than they need to, they don't get it. But too many economics papers just assume a rational market and a manageable number of possible variables and that anything else is noise that can be ignored.
As an educator in every course I ever gave it was women who where all shy about bragging they could do a thing that they did for years, while men who watched a single YouTube-video on the issue acted as if they were top experts on the field. E.g. girl who single handedly run light shows at a club for years wouldn't say she knows a lot about the technology, while a guy who once connected an LED stripe would say he does. And it always turns out that the girl knows more.
Guys are just better at convincing themselves (and by extension: others) they can do a thing when they can't — and people who can do more things get more money.
But from an employers perspective you loose out if you don't see theough that.
You know, the boys who don't brag are harder to notice in the sea of testosterone. This is one of the reasons that prejudice is so unintelligent and problematic.
There's simply zero chance that you didn't have a single male student who could outcompete a female student at least once in any topic. Your eyes were ignorant with prejudice.
Exaggeration. It was exaggeration. As explained in the other comment, this is an observed trend, not a universal rule.
If male students are silent or don't brag I treat them exactly the same way as I treat female students that are silent and don't brag. In the rare case of bragging female students I treat them the same as bragging male students.
Prejudice is a true danger, but the things I discribed here is about a trend I observe in hindsight and does in no way inform my teaching (except maybe that I try hard to create a climate in which also silent people dare to to talk).
And it being a trend means there have been all kind of outliers on all sides and into all directions.
> too many economics papers just assume a rational market and a manageable number of possible variables and that anything else is noise that can be ignored
Did you read the paper? Their data are from the Austrian social security registry from 1972 to 2007 [1]. None of this assumes a rational market; they're going out of their way to document a persistent possible irrationality.
I was talking about "a manageable number of possible variables". They only looked at a few factors and didn't mention the ones I mentioned above. Yes, they used data. But it wasn't really adequate data.
Isn't this really a new perspective on something that economists have been saying for years now? Specifically: the economy has been growing for high-skilled workers and dysfunctional for low-skilled workers. Alternatively, the economy has been unable to efficiently incorporate the efforts of less skilled men.
It's nice to have some data, but we still don't know what to do.
Any study looking at labor sorting need to acknowledge that wages are not the only attribute which people (and employers) selects for. Wages are nice in terms of getting statistics since it is public record, but the conclusion is limited to asking more simplistic questions:
Based on the average wage of a persons lifetime, how close will each job a person take be to that expected wage, assuming it is adjusted for time and inflation. Same question for the employer in terms of what they pay employees.
56 comments
[ 7.3 ms ] story [ 1546 ms ] threadHighest wage firms have to be faang, by number of employees right? Private equity and top legal positions being fewer.
Yes, then there is tech, and it often does prove to pay the best for high skilled work like software development, and thats great. Lets not forget before google, samsung, and microsoft had cloud storage, there was another semi-popular cloud storage company whos owner was raided and placed on house arrest for years. Nor should we forget that companies like twitter were taking government bribes to engage in censorship. Its not like everything thats happened in tech has been a product of the free market, there is quite a bit of government help thats helped solidify the market dominance of certain tech companies.
Those that believe that "high-ability workers" made themselves, that market valuation of a person is fair and reflects what that person deserves, will also view this positive correlation as positive.
Those that see otherwise, e.g. that grok the Matthew Effect[1], systemic prejudice in society, that no human created themselves, or that humans should not be "priced" like commodities, will not. As the paper points out:
There is sorting everywhere in the economy:
- Wealthier, more educated, more attractive men on average marry wealthier, more educated, more attractive women.
- Higher-income households reside in distinct neighborhoods and send their children to better schools than low-income households.
- Elite universities enroll the most qualified undergraduates.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Matthew_effect
Even believing those things, why would you not still see it as positive? Would it be better if high-performing people worked for lower-performing companies? Wouldn't an inability for higher-performing workers to move to higher-performing companies reflect a lack of worker freedom?
Most luck you or I have wouldn't exist is if someone close to us decided to coast or fuck up instead of making sure to cash keep cashing in those lottery tickets every day
If we could take half the 120+ IQ folks working at high frequency trading firms or on online advertisements and scatter them to work in local trade businesses, restaurants, civil services, etc, I think it’d be a net positive.
Such a waste
money.
Example: society wants more quality teachers, so society chooses to increase the federal education budget to increase teacher salaries. Consequently, more highly educated people choose to become teachers, however, this unintentionally exacerbates the doctor shortage and further increases corporate lawyer salaries due to decreased supply of lawyers.
for what it is worth, IQ of 120 is pretty tame e.g. 1 in 10 people and I think there are lots of smart people that DO work in trades, restaurants, and civil services. I am friends with many .
But then again, I disagree with your premise that these other careers are intelligence starved - some of my smartest friends do them.
I think rather those careers are simply more stifling and less creative. That is to say your HFT seems flashy because they are doing novel work in a developing area. If they were in the civil service, they probably wouldn't be reinventing the wheel, but just an efficient bureaucrat.
I don’t believe everyone working in e.g. food service is dumb (nor that everyone working in adtech or HFT is smart), only that the distribution is probably quite extremely uneven.
There is plenty of space for creativity and novel thinking within bureaucracies, trades, service industries, etc., and that is exactly the reason it’d be great to have a more even distribution of smart people into them.
An efficient bureaucrat can navigate themselves to the right place to make a huge amount of impact on people’s actual daily lives at scale. That’s a good thing!
On the whole you can think that there's Company A and Company B, where both produce different amounts of value. There's an optimal state of how much each company should be funded in order for optimal value production from both together. The more accurate you are with allocating funds the best are the gains.
So in that sense it's not zero sum.
It's zero sum within the system. The existence of HFT as a whole is positive sum, though I agree that the compensation differential attributed to it outclasses that sum by a large measure.
There’s an element of Feinman’s spinning, wobbling plates [1]. The problems one must solve to push latency ever lower have knock-on effects.
> whereas earlier you could say that tighter spreads and more liquidity helps other market participants
The guarantee of being nipped curtails entire classes of dirty behaviour. Chunking out an order is smart, but it wasn’t always done. HFT, in this model, serves an adversarial regulatory function.
We also have the basic fact that, in a Ricardian sense, folks are trading with that HFT shop over their slower competitors. At some infinitesimal level, the counterparty chose (and was delivered on) that preference.
[1] https://pubs.aip.org/aapt/ajp/article-abstract/75/3/240/1056...
Of course I’m suspicious of any system that claims to be able to globally optimize in this way, but I do think it’d be better for almost everyone if we could.
What I’m suggesting is that we shouldn’t have, increasingly, one end of our economy operated largely by 90-110 IQ folks and one end operated largely by 120+ IQ folks. Especially when the end operated by the 90-110 folks is the one that 99% of people are actually interacting with on a daily basis and when the 120+ IQ end has a propensity to produce extremely intense, near-zero sum competitions that drive the net value of their intelligence to near-zero.
If I am understanding your definition of "tame", you think that being a 1-in-10 person in terms of intelligence is not significant, right?
If so, I beg to differ; coming first in a race of 10 people is a huge differentiator of abilities.
>If so, I beg to differ; coming first in a race of 10 people is a huge differentiator of abilities
IQ, by its very nature, doesnt shed much light on comparative performance. I would say there are big differences top to bottom, but you probably wouldnt be able to tell the difference in ability between the 1st and 2nd person out of 10.
Per my value system, what we want is to match people to work that they are good at, and for any particular ability, we want to match people who have more ability to societal needs that are more important. "Higher performing company" does not equate to "more important company". I'm glad Einstein chose to be a physicist rather than be a Facebook engineer (or whatever the equivalent was in his time). I don't believe anyone should be billionaires or fabulously wealthy, but if I did, it would be people like Einstein, not Mark Zuckerberg, or people like Musk who would have paid Einstein some minimal market-driven amount more than Princeton would have (from the government subsidies Must gets) while convincing people he (Musk) is responsible for all the great technological advances resulting from Einstein's work, keeping all the profits for himself and pouring them into even more extractive schemes.
> Wouldn't an inability for higher-performing workers to move to higher-performing companies reflect a lack of worker freedom?
Doesn't the inability of lower-performing workers to not be coerced into working for slave wages under slave conditions represent a lack of freedom? What about the children of lower-performing workers who are locked into poorer schools, poorer nutrition, poorer environments, less quality time with their parents and many other disadvantages?
And what if higher-performing companies are those that are best at extracting the most value out of bottom-level workers, effectively acting as intermediate slave owners for consumers who get cheap goods on the backs of bottom-level workers and their lack of freedom?
But state and federal funding supplements local tax school funding to achieve approximately equal funding per pupil, and the US is 4th in the world (behind only Luxembourg, Norway, and Iceland) in per-student primary education spending [1]. So what makes those schools "good"?
[1] https://www.statista.com/statistics/238733/expenditure-on-ed...
We’re in Cambridge, MA (one high school for the entire city). I bet the correlations among parents’ academic achievement, household income, parental involvement, and kids’ scholastic accomplishment are all positive or strongly positive. (There cannot be a difference in school, being only one.)
Bingo. It's parenting. I won't go into how I can positively confirm this, but I can as a "captain" as reddit used to refer to it...
Wealthy areas still out fund raise, out tax, and out volunteer poorer areas.
Why should an arbitrary child whose parents are paying 100,000 INR in India end up with better start to finish improvement over an arbitrary child in the US whose government is spending $17,000? Here are the numbers adjusted to match:
100,000 INR converts to $1,202
India's PPP coefficient is 3.5x
Therefore, 100,000 INR is equivalent to $4,200 in the US.
A quarter of the spending and the start-to-finish delta is much higher there. The reason we can't do that here is multifaceted, but maybe the answer is looking to how their schools do it.
This is not wage inequality because these are not equal things. More productive employees are not equal to less productive ones. Productive men are not equal to less productive (article's words not mien) women. If 2 different things are not equal, then there is no inequality.
> Therefore, stronger sorting contributes to widening the gap between high and low earners.
The gap between labor and labor is insignificant compared to the gap between labor and capital.
The paper is saying that higher-earning men are more likely to work for companies which pay higher wages (to all their employees). Put another way, 100 men who are equally high-earning across their work experience are not randomly distributed in high- and low- wage companies, but are more concentrated in high-wage companies.
In the HN context, maybe it makes sense to say "higher-earning men are more likely to get jobs at FAANG rather than earn the same amount at Microsoft/some non-OpenAI startup/a bank".
Guys are just better at convincing themselves (and by extension: others) they can do a thing when they can't — and people who can do more things get more money.
But from an employers perspective you loose out if you don't see theough that.
There's simply zero chance that you didn't have a single male student who could outcompete a female student at least once in any topic. Your eyes were ignorant with prejudice.
As with most generalizations, this isn't true every time.
> And it always turns out that the girl knows more.
Even had <i> always </i> in the statement. I don't think logically you and GP can both be in agreement.
If male students are silent or don't brag I treat them exactly the same way as I treat female students that are silent and don't brag. In the rare case of bragging female students I treat them the same as bragging male students.
And it being a trend means there have been all kind of outliers on all sides and into all directions.
Did you read the paper? Their data are from the Austrian social security registry from 1972 to 2007 [1]. None of this assumes a rational market; they're going out of their way to document a persistent possible irrationality.
[1] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w24074/w240... § 3.1
"Sorting between workers and firms can have significant implications for wage inequality."
It's nice to have some data, but we still don't know what to do.
Based on the average wage of a persons lifetime, how close will each job a person take be to that expected wage, assuming it is adjusted for time and inflation. Same question for the employer in terms of what they pay employees.