What's Fair Pay?

Engineers, like everyone else, probably consider the price of work as the most important price in a person's life.  The labor market is where we trade our skills for shelter, food, and hopefully happiness.  For better or worse, your wage will go a long way to determining the sort of life you will lead. 

Two things drive engineering wages - - how valuable the job is to the employer and the supply and demand for workers in a given skill.  Rising pay has nothing to do with justice.  Today, an engineer can produce in less than ten minutes what it took an engineer in 1890 an hour to produce.  That's why we make more money.  Other patterns of compensation are fairly easy to understand and some don't make any sense - -

• Highly educated workers tend to earn more than those with less schooling.
• In India, men who are fluent in English earn 34% more than those who don't speak the language - - even, if for example, they are both PhDs.
• The "tall" make 10% more for every four inches in extra height.
• The "ugly" earn less than the "pretty" - - regardless of whether beauty has anything to do with the job.

Clearly some of this appears as out right discrimination.  Others have attempted to loop this back to productivity issues.  Studies in Sweden found that taller people are smarter and stronger and have better social skills because they were healthier and better nourished as children.  Being taller, they had higher self-esteem.  The short are simply less productive.  And productivity is what bosses go to the labor market to buy.

Like I said - - and some don't make any sense.