> The market judges everyone’s skills, and barring nepotism, the market will pay everyone what they are worth, which is sadly not much for a lot of people.
false in the general case, you're basically invoking a just world hypothesis without actual proof for it.
For a counter example, please see slavery - slaves were not paid anything, despite obviously producing something of worth. Furthermore, there was no difference in the salaries between slaves, despite there presumably being differences in output.
For another counter example, you can look into the variation in programmer salaries based on country, or more generally location. The same job will pay anywhere from $180k in SF to $8k in India, due to differences in cost of living, which have a priori zero effect on programmer 'worth', which I presume would be how good the programmer is at writing code and delivering business value.
It is true that at a certain point, 'real skills' matter - eventually, if you're working as a software engineer, you need to write code. However, it is false to assume there is anything besides a maybe a very mild correlation, if any, in the salaries of software engineers and their ability. You can have a Polish dev with 15 years of experience making less than a new grad in California, and that has nothing to do with skill, but everything to do with regional differences in salary.
everything you have used as an example is not a free market, it is government interference.
1) slavery was enforced by the government who had use of force to compel. There was no voluntary two party agreements.
2) countries are governmental constructs with barriers enforced by use of force. A polish programmer cant work in the US due to governmental interference.
Now that the borders are wide open expect to see programmers exploiting the work loopholes to get work visas that allow them to work at market wages.
there is no perfect information and there will always be mismatches. But in a free market those mismatches are temporary. Also the market may be valuing things other than technical prowess (e.g. english proficiency, understanding of cultural norms etc)
Voluntary two party agreements work because they are enforced by a government.
Markets only exist in the presence of government. Read David Graeber's Debt if you want a history of how markets and money work - generally speaking, they are things created by governments, to ease the work of figuring out taxation. Those quarters and nickels and dimes only have value because you know that come tax season, Uncle Sam will knock on your door and ask you for some, and if you don't give them to him, he'll toss you in jail. This creates a demand for those coins, and therefore a market for them, so now Uncle Sam can pay his soldiers in coin, the soldiers trade it with civilians for food and lodging and boom, it's a market!
You seem to be doing that thing where you want to believe the world is fair, so you invent this magical free market to be able to pretend that life is fair.
To paraphrase Dan Luu: markets are people, all the way down.
You're missing the point. OP is generally right. It's a hard world out there, and you have to be educated to succeed at anything more than a trade or service industry job.
The market pays what their skills are worth given the demand for their skills in that location. That's all. If someone is in India they will not be paid a SF salary for many reasons. But the market sorts all of it into a quantifiable price for labor. If you want to voluntarily pay more than what the market demands, that's more akin to charity.
this may be a difference in definition of worth that we have.
You seem to equate "worth" with "market price"/"business value".
I equate "worth" with "how much money they make the business".
So in my defintion/worldview, an programmer in India that increases the click through rate on $AD_TECH_GIANT's ads by 1%, raising the ARR from $1 billion to $1 billion, $10 million dollars is worth $10 million, and a programmer in San Fransisco who accomplishes the same is worth the same.
In your worldview, how much value they bring to the organisation is irrelevant, and they are worth what the market pays them... which honestly doesn't strike me as a particularly useful mental model if you're trying to get rich, but if it works for you, keep using it.
To quote Warren Buffet:
"price is what you pay, value is what you get."
I try to find things with a good value/price ratio. Using your model, the value of a thing is it's price, so... not really sure how you can make purchase decisions thinking like that, honestly.
By that definition, a business has to always pay someone less than what they're worth in order for hiring them to be a value proposition.
If I'm paid what I'm "worth" why would a business spend any time/effort interviewing and hiring me -- the best that can happen is they will break even through the deal.
It would be like buying a stock you know will flatline at the purchase price for the next 20 years. No monetary loss, but no gain either -- that's almost the definition of opportunity cost.
false in the general case, you're basically invoking a just world hypothesis without actual proof for it.
For a counter example, please see slavery - slaves were not paid anything, despite obviously producing something of worth. Furthermore, there was no difference in the salaries between slaves, despite there presumably being differences in output.
For another counter example, you can look into the variation in programmer salaries based on country, or more generally location. The same job will pay anywhere from $180k in SF to $8k in India, due to differences in cost of living, which have a priori zero effect on programmer 'worth', which I presume would be how good the programmer is at writing code and delivering business value.
It is true that at a certain point, 'real skills' matter - eventually, if you're working as a software engineer, you need to write code. However, it is false to assume there is anything besides a maybe a very mild correlation, if any, in the salaries of software engineers and their ability. You can have a Polish dev with 15 years of experience making less than a new grad in California, and that has nothing to do with skill, but everything to do with regional differences in salary.