[mananaysiempre]

“Price discrimination” (or in this case “wage discrimination”) as described in microeconomics is exactly this—the same seller/buyer demanding/offering different prices for the same goods depending on their idea of how much the buyer/seller will bear. The term has nothing to do except etymology with what sociologists, lawyers, or politicians mean by the word “discrimination” (not that those three groups mean the same thing by it).

[SkyBelow]

The issue is that many small scale price discriminations on individually reasonable criteria might present itself as a large scale discrimination of the type that lawmakers and others do care about. The way terms are overloaded does no favors, but even if we updated the terminology to resolve this, I think the underlying issue will remain.

Pink tax is an example of this happening, though on a scale needing far invasive technology than is currently available. It is presented as (big) discrimination even though it happens as price discrimination.

[vundercind]

It’s more than that, I think: if this paper holds up (or if it doesn’t, but the ideas it covers are valid and the practices it’s concerned with later come into being) then it’s describing a mechanism for pushing down worker wages at the individual level, and within potentially any or all bands of the economy toward the market-clearing rate per worker. A market of many workers becomes many markets of one worker.

This is, um, potentially really bad. It’s several effects that already happen in, if you will, chunkier ways in our economy (especially in the US, with weak or absent unions and poor labor protection laws, compared to many other developed states) becoming applied at a much finer level of resolution (so to speak).