Why do I get paid? The fact that I blog shows that I'm happy to write for nothing. So why does someone pay me to do so?
The crude neoclassical view is that I have a positive marginal product, and wages should equal marginal product.
But this probably doesn't apply to me - indeed, it might not apply to anyone. My employer hasn't the foggiest idea what my marginal product is. And it's competition that forces wages to equal marginal product, but competition is lacking in my case. My relationship with the IC is more like a bilateral monopoly. I'm pretty much the only person they know who can do what I do, and they are pretty much the only people who think I'm employable.
Instead, there are two reasons why I get paid.
One is the norm of reciprocity. In blogging, I'm happy to write for nothing because I get something back - other people's blogs. I'm helping contribute to a public good, a sphere of open egalitarian discourse. But I'm not happy to give something for nothing to a capitalist bureaucracy, as there's no non-pecuniary benefit. So there has to be a pecuniary benefit. To satisfy my enormous self-regard, I have to be paid more than most people.
Employer-employee relations are, in part, an exchange of gifts. Our employers pay us more than the bare minimum wage required to get us through the door. And in exchange, we do more than the bare minimum of work - that's efficiency wages.
What determine's the size of the gift? In part, it's Adam Smith's theory of compensating advantages.
Though writing on economics is not a disutility for me, employment is. I have to live in London, and waste time traveling to work. And I have to submit to the constraint of not writing on large swathes of economics. These are disadvantages which the gift exchange requires I be compensated for. I'm not paid for working - I'm paid for not working.
Because I need an income, I'm happy to accept these disadvantages.
This isn't, I hope, mere navel-gazing. The message is that marginal product is, for many people, not very relevant to how their wages are set.
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