ummester, on 18 December 2011 - 11:33 AM, said:
Personally, i'm not sure if any jobs should be that highly paid. Bosses should get more than staff and CEOs more than bosses, sure, just like Lts get mopre than SGTs and so on in miltary systems. You should be paid for making descisions but most things require a team of people to make them work and the divide between payment for hierarcy in a team should never be that great, IMO.
If someone hits it lucky with artistic creation, scientific invention or capital investment or something then I guess they deserve renumeration.
I recon though, that if someone did some serious wage study, they would find in these last couple of bubbly decades the divide between upper and lower wages has increased substantially. It is that division that I feel needs to be righted somehow. Is a bank CEO really 100+ times more important than a teller in that environment?
Totally and utterly - off topic!!!
What Umm posts is a good question with a whole range of responses.
Its actually a pet subject of mine, and I've commented in other places about it.
It suggests firstly that all human beings are not equal.
Is this true?
That given the circumstances of their environment and birth place and time, they would not all be capable of achieving what others do.
Is this true?
Apart from obvious disabilities caused by genetics or accident, could another human being placed into a position of privilege still be able to achieve the outcome of those who claim to have some higher advantage?
It has been the stuff of movies (My Fair Lady, Changing Places, Freaky Friday, etc) and numerous behavioural studies (Carl Rogers, Pavlov, Myers/Briggs, etc) which illustrate that given the right instruction and adequate training that most human beings can excel.
In fact recent neurological studies suggest that even our IQ, once believed to be static can in fact be enhanced, given the right stimulus. The measure of IQ is based on the assumption that you are born with a particular IQ and it stays constant.
Various physchological studies would suggest that people are wired differently however, and may approach problems from different angles.
Quote
The "big five" are broad categories of personality traits. While there is a significant body of literature supporting this five-factor model of personality, researchers don't always agree on the exact labels for each dimension. However, these five categories are usually described as follows:
Extraversion: This trait includes characteristics such as excitability, sociability, talkativeness, assertiveness and high amounts of emotional expressiveness.
Agreeableness: This personality dimension includes attributes such as trust, altruism, kindness, affection, and other prosocial behaviors.
Conscientiousness: Common features of this dimension include high levels of thoughtfulness, with good impulse control and goal-directed behaviors. Those high in conscientiousness tend to be organized and mindful of details.
Neuroticism: Individuals high in this trait tend to experience emotional instability, anxiety, moodiness, irritability, and sadness.
Openness: This trait features characteristics such as imagination and insight, and those high in this trait also tend to have a broad range of interests.
It is important to note that each of the five personality factors represents a range between two extremes. For example, extraversion represents a continuum between extreme extraversion and extreme introversion. In the real world, most people lie somewhere in between the two polar ends of each dimension.
So if its true that most of our capability are derived from nurture, rather than nature, what makes a CEO any more important than the janitor.
Is it an implied importance. That is, has it simply been implied that a person in a position of decision making and overall oversight has more importance than someone who completes mundane tasks. That would seem to be how the western industrialised world has determined it should be.
We also grade professions on the basis of their importance as well.
For instance, Doctors are regarded as more important than lawyers, or accountants or engineers, purely because of the work they perform.
But Paramedics and Nurses, are not paid anywhere near the equivalent of doctors, lawyers or accountants. Is this fair?
What constitutes our determination of levels of human beings, in terms of their labour and knowledge?
In certain countries of the world, monks and holy men and women are held in high esteem, whereas in most Western countries they are regarded as irrelevent.
Why the disparity?
Is a single human being 100x more important than another in the scheme of society?
What about 50x or 10x.
How do we ultimately determine that.
Based on salary alone?
There is a lot more material contained in the question Umm proposes than a cursory glance suggests, and whilst I read Peachy's reply, I don't necessarily agree with it.
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