wacky hypothesis: workers in the US are systematically underpaid due to the taboo we have on talking about salaries. the information asymmetry between employees and employers makes it easy for employers to screw employees over.
evidence: CEO pay went up dramatically after a law passed saying that CEO salaries had to be made public. software engineer salaries are quite high, and we’re a profession that is unusually, extremely open about how much we get paid. (I’m always open to sharing this info with people privately, btw!)
counter-evidence: this seems like a really easy problem to solve (get people to actually use Glassdoor or whatever to share salaries; should be easy since it’s in their best interest), so why hasn’t it been solved already?
Re: https://spiralingintocontrol.tumblr.com/post/162203940673/another-normal-anomaly
I’m open with my family about how much I make, but not entirely by choice. With friends I rarely get asked, but in a social context like this, I make 38K and I’m expecting a raise at some point that increases it to 44K. I’m a research assistant at a large public university, with a BA in a related field from one of the best universities in the world for that subject. However, this price is not in the slightest determined by “market factors” related to my job of any sort. I told my boss-to-be that I needed 30K to live on, but it turns out that there’s money in the grant to pay me 44K, so I’m getting the raise. I don’t really have any colleagues to chat about wages with in the sense you’re talking about: I have an office in a building with around eight middle-aged men and the administrator, a woman in her 30s who I exchange pleasantries with but don’t really know.
I wouldn’t really bring up my pay in most contexts, because I am, like many Americans, a temporarily embarrassed member of the upper-middle class. More seriously I suspect that, with the exceptions of a few dancers I’m friends with and my housemates, everyone I know in DC who works earns substantially more than I do, and they might interpret my statement of salary as a request for money or subsidization of some sort. It’s not unreasonable: Bryan straight-up asked me how much of a subsidy it would take for me to buy food when I went out for lunch with the group. Because he’s a libertarian economist and that’s how he solves problems. And it’s not even that I’m unwilling to accept subsidies, it’s that I tend to output guess culture until I know whether people have a preference.
I’d be much more willing to talk about how much I make with people I didn’t think out-earned me, or in specifically relevant contexts: if an academic I know who doesn’t work with me asked about my job, I might mention pay.
I basically endorse this.