On Wed, 13 Oct 2004, Sasha Pachev wrote:
Hanity charges $100,000 per appearance + travel expenses. Moore charges $40,000 per expenses. Both get it regularly.
Heh, I heard on NPR that the "travel expenses" that UVSC is paying Hanity comes to $50,000. Dollars to donuts you won't hear anybody outraged about that!
It appears that the law that the amount of pay is inversely proportionate to the usefulness of the labor you perform holds very well in those examples.
In addition to the people who are not subject to typical market forces, here's something to think about ...
In Econ 110 we talked about how the amount a person gets paid is correlated to the number of people that the person can "service" at a particular time. In other words, Moore can give a *single* speech to hundreds, thousands, or even millions of people thanks to modern technology. A plumber can only fix *one* stopped up drain at a time, an EMT can only save *one* person's life at a time, etc. That's why you don't get "superstar" EMTs, but you get get "superstar" basketball players that (arguably) aren't any more talented than the EMT but make a thousand times more. Millions of people watch the basketball player perform, and even if the value of them watching isn't very high, it adds up. Meanwhile even if the value of an EMT is very high, there's simply a very limited amount of people he'll come in contact with in a single day.
That's always why Computer Programmers are considerably higher up the list than the others you mentioned--I can write a piece of software that thousands, perhaps even millions can use. (If I write one that millions of people can use, I'll probably have a salary up there near Moore and Hannity's ... unless, of course, I don't charge for said software ;-)
~ Ross
--
This sentence would be seven words long if it were six words shorter.
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