“reducing salaries wouldn’t have enough of an effect to qualitatively change oversupply.”
Right, this^ is what I mean.
This roughly cashes out to an income elasticity of labour (/applicant) supply of 1-2 (i.e. you reduce applicant supply by ~20% by reducing income ~~10%).
Oh, interesting.
It was a rough, off-the-top-of-my-head prediction, so I wouldn’t give the specific numbers too much weight.
That said, there’s probably a gradient of applicant income elasticity here (and in most places? I don’t know very much about labor economics).
I’d expect dropping salaries by $10k to reduce the applicant pool substantially, and by $20k to reduce it somewhat more. But there’s probably a hard core of applicants whose demand is quite inelastic (i.e. who would be excited to apply to EA jobs regardless of whether they paid $35,000 or $70,000).
And probably also there’s some lower bound where anything under it is too little to live on, such that setting salaries under that threshold would cause a sharp drop-off in applications.
Right, this^ is what I mean.
Oh, interesting.
It was a rough, off-the-top-of-my-head prediction, so I wouldn’t give the specific numbers too much weight.
That said, there’s probably a gradient of applicant income elasticity here (and in most places? I don’t know very much about labor economics).
I’d expect dropping salaries by $10k to reduce the applicant pool substantially, and by $20k to reduce it somewhat more. But there’s probably a hard core of applicants whose demand is quite inelastic (i.e. who would be excited to apply to EA jobs regardless of whether they paid $35,000 or $70,000).
And probably also there’s some lower bound where anything under it is too little to live on, such that setting salaries under that threshold would cause a sharp drop-off in applications.