OT - Required Listing of Salary Ranges on Job Postings

[Johnson85]

You're not helping your case. The common thought, expressed often in this thread, is that the higher performers can make what they are worth, and the poor performers are making what they are worth and are not underpaid. What you are making clear is that a hospital (and all employers) doesn't pay based on performance, but whether on availability.

That's somebody else's case. My case would be that markets are messy and they are good not because they are always right, but because the worst results tend to get competed away and on average, they get it closer to right, more often, than any other system we have available. In some fields, like sales, high performers get paid more. In other fields, like nursing or teaching, where there is relatively muted feedback from the consumer, there is less penalty for trading quality for lower cost, which means quality in some sense gets "penalized" in how it is paid compered to the value created.

If they can't find another worker that meets the minimum requirements that will work for low pay, then and only then will they consider paying market worth for the position. That hospitals could easily fill their open positions by paying more, but they raise profits by using these schemes to pay less.

If they can find somebody that meets the minimum requirements and will work for low pay, that is the market worth for the position. If they find it's a better value to pay more for a higher value employee, that's the market worth for that position. There is no set amount at which someone is paid correctly or intrinsic value as to what their labor is worth or whatever. In areas where there are big distortions by government intervention, then it makes more sense to say they aren't being paid their market rate, b/c it's implicitly saying they aren't geting what they would be paid if the government stopped distorting the market. But there are so many markets grossly distorted by the government it's hard to even say waht the market rate is, other than it's the amount needed to keep employers from decamping for other fields. Teachers would fall in this category. I assume nurses would too.

In a sense, good for them. That's capitalism. What grinds my gears though is when peeps like you can't look at that chart of pay vs productivity over the last few decades and accept and admit that it's due to the creation and proliferation of schemes like this. That we didn't outcompete anyone (other than in ruthlessness), it wasn't tax changes, that all our corporate profit and associated gains came from innovations in screwing workers.

Almost every chart of pay v. productivity I see is comparing hourly workers or at best non-supervisory workers to productivity. Those are garbage charts designed to reach a pre-determined opinion.

Labor compensation as a share of GDP fluctuates over time but does appear to generally be on a downward trend since 1970, although it had a pretty high peak around 2000. That doesn't seem obviously crazy to me or a sign of something nefarious going on in a time frame where we have automated more and more stuff, although opening up trade probably also hurt as well as liberal illegal immigration.