[gruez]

The concept of "underpaid" and "fair" wages is fundamentally subjective. Is a burger flipper underpaid because he cant raise a family a buy a house on that wage, "underpaid"? Or is his labor simply not that valuable? Is a techbro making $300k "underpaid" because his employer is making $500k off his work?

On the other hand skilled vs unskilled labor, as well as the concept of human capital are well recognized concepts in economics.

[uolmir]

Ah yes, the famously objective field of economics.

[gruez]

Are you suggesting that the difference in skill level between a burger flipper and an accountant is purely subjective?

[account-5]

Since that depends on the burger flipper, I'd say yes. Gordon Ramsay would likely agree.

[gruez]

That's just playing with words. Putting Gordon Ramsay in the same bucket as "burger flipper" makes as much sense as putting Linus Torvalds in the same bucket as "keyboard monkey".

[lubutu]

The distinction I suppose is that what you really mean is "the difference in [necessary] skill level between a burger flipper and an accountant".

[robertlagrant]

Not skill - that's an internal metric not an external one. The difference is between what people will pay for that skill.

[account-5]

Perspective actually. And what you perceive to be value.

[gruez]

Why are you pivoting to "value"? The original discussion was about skilled vs unskilled labor and whether that assessment is subjective vs objective. You might think that accountants are useless paper pushers whereas burger flippers are Hard Working People That Get Actual Things Done™, but that's orthogonal to how much skill[1] is needed to flip burgers vs be an accountant.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skill_(labor)

[nojster]

With the two examples you chose, I‘d say there is not much of a skill gap.

If you‘d have chosen a burger flipper and an aeronautical engineer or a surgeon, I‘d have agreed with you.

[gruez]

> With the two examples you chose, I‘d say there is not much of a skill gap.

Unless we're talking about really high end burgers, you can take almost anyone off the street and train them to flip burger patties within a day. They might not willingly do it on account of it being boring/tiring/poorly paid work, but it's not exactly hard to learn either. I doubt you can do the same for an accountant, unless your idea of an accountant is something like "manually copying entries into a ledger". Even teaching excel to someone who hasn't used excel ever, to a capacity where they can do meaningful financial reporting probably can't be done within a day.

[nojster]

On a relative scale, I agree with you that the amount of training involved differs for accountants and burger flippers, thus this is a good example.

On an absolute scale, comparing skills of burger flippers, accountants, aeronautical engineers and surgeons, the first two basically lump together.

I look at skill gap more in terms of „how hard is it to completely automate/autonomize this job“. Which is fiercely easy both for the burger flipper and the accountant, yet a bit harder (though not impossible) for the other two.