Also, if employees forgo just some luxury goods and conspicuous consumption in their social reference class (not saying one should never go on holidays or to restaurants), one could afford everything that would make one instrumentally more effective.
This is probably true for people without children, but not necessarily when you’re talking about extended hours of good-quality childcare. And once you have children, the costs of leisure like holidays and restaurants also increases.
Yes you’re right, some people have very high costs, like people who care for others or also people with health issues. As a matter of public policy I think we should incentivize people to have more children, and also again, maybe EA orgs should give good perks packages (including care benefits, health and disability insurance).
But pricing all of this in, I still maintain that in most cases the pay should be slightly under market-rate (recall that I said this should be progressive, where the ‘EA pay cut’ gets larger as salary increases… I don’t have strong opinions about the absolute level).
Even if we were to pay slightly above market rate, just like the card charge scenario, problems like the high cost of childcare will persist at many salary levels. Also, again, if we hire someone whose long-term average market rate is $30/h and childcare is $40/h, then maybe it’s better to still pay them $29.5/h and their comparative advantage then is to do ‘EtG’ by watching their children, taking paid-time off and then coming back at a normal working week, rather than artificially inflating their salary to $41/h so that they can take less time off and work longer hours.
I agree with most of this, but one point on
This is probably true for people without children, but not necessarily when you’re talking about extended hours of good-quality childcare. And once you have children, the costs of leisure like holidays and restaurants also increases.
Yes you’re right, some people have very high costs, like people who care for others or also people with health issues. As a matter of public policy I think we should incentivize people to have more children, and also again, maybe EA orgs should give good perks packages (including care benefits, health and disability insurance).
But pricing all of this in, I still maintain that in most cases the pay should be slightly under market-rate (recall that I said this should be progressive, where the ‘EA pay cut’ gets larger as salary increases… I don’t have strong opinions about the absolute level).
Even if we were to pay slightly above market rate, just like the card charge scenario, problems like the high cost of childcare will persist at many salary levels. Also, again, if we hire someone whose long-term average market rate is $30/h and childcare is $40/h, then maybe it’s better to still pay them $29.5/h and their comparative advantage then is to do ‘EtG’ by watching their children, taking paid-time off and then coming back at a normal working week, rather than artificially inflating their salary to $41/h so that they can take less time off and work longer hours.