[em-bee]

the problem is that there is an elite to begin with. being highly educated should not make people feel entitled to benefits, but rather it should make them feel obligated to use their education to contribute to society.

if education is free or even comes with financial support then there is no need for higher salaries to compensate the expense. a computer science master and a master baker should have the same incentive.

[sudhirj]

This has not been and never will be the case because of leverage. A master baker can serve maybe a 100 people with an oven, a developer can serve 100 million with a RaspberryPi. Short of violence-enforced "equality" this simply can't happen.

[em-bee]

that's an interesting argument, but i it doesn't add up. i only need one baker to cover all my daily need for bread, but the software that i use requires thousands of developers to maintain. so, yes, while a single developer can reach millions of people, that single developer only contributes a tiny fraction to the life of each of them.

you have to really look at the recipient side of things. how much of a factor is IT in the life of an individual, compared to other professions?

of course they are not all equal. a hairdresser is needed once a month, the baker daily, the doctor once a quarter, IT, well, depends on what kind of work i do. of course it's not all equal. but we also have many more programmers than bakers.

the value of each of those varies for each individual, but in the end it all balances out. i am not advocating that everyone should get exactly the same pay, but there is no reason that one particular profession must be strictly more valuable than another.

[sudhirj]

Yeah, this gets messed up when money is the expression of value. Any profession with leverage will make more money, without necessarily being more valuable. Same way a HFT/quant fund manager makes more than my kid’s schoolteacher, or even my kid’s doctor, but the teacher and doctor are far more valuable than the fund manager.