I find salary pretty confusing. My current guess is that EAs are too willing to flatten salary across different counterfactuals and experience levels, rather than too unwilling. In particular, one intuitive heuristic in my head is something like “many people are willing to give up 20-50% of salary to do the right thing, but relatively few people are willing to give up >>70%.”
Maybe this is wrong? I know there’s empirical research that people with more money benefit less from percentage increases in their spending, so I can see why e.g. someone with a 50k salary taking a 25% paycut is similarly (or more!) costly to someone with a 300k salary taking a 70% paycut. But it’s not very intuitive to me, and I’m confused why this point is not more often brought up when discussing questions of salary fairness.
I find salary pretty confusing. My current guess is that EAs are too willing to flatten salary across different counterfactuals and experience levels, rather than too unwilling. In particular, one intuitive heuristic in my head is something like “many people are willing to give up 20-50% of salary to do the right thing, but relatively few people are willing to give up >>70%.”
Maybe this is wrong? I know there’s empirical research that people with more money benefit less from percentage increases in their spending, so I can see why e.g. someone with a 50k salary taking a 25% paycut is similarly (or more!) costly to someone with a 300k salary taking a 70% paycut. But it’s not very intuitive to me, and I’m confused why this point is not more often brought up when discussing questions of salary fairness.