This person is soooo close to figuring out that the problem is capitalism. This is capitalism working as intended.
As we all know, you can’t make a critique of capitalism without including “capitalism bad” in your critique.
No sarcasm, that’s actually exactly what we should be doing. So many people, even people who otherwise call themselves conservatives, have opinions that are so close to realizing that everything sucking is the intentional result of concentrating wealth in the hands of a few, and yet when it comes time to vote they believe the bullshit spewed by the owner class and vote against their own interests. It gets tiring pointing out that capitalism is the root of just about every evil that exists today, but if the paid shills don’t get tired of blaming everything on minorities and maliciously mislabeling everything, we shouldn’t get tired either.
The internet has a serious issue with managers, upper management, and even landlords nowadays. It’s so weird to see people slip back into blaming anyone but the real grifters who provide no benefit but take a dollar for no real benefit, or the wage inequality with CSuites. Even people here are falling back into blaming people in their own wage bracket rather than looking at people who provide nothing or paid too much.
As someone who’s worked the peon doing the shit to management, so much of the issue is rooted in insurance and government mandated oversight.
People love to hate on their manager making $20,000-40,000 more than them, but they’re basically the same as you to everyone grifting or the 1%. Quit blaming them for living in a society that both WANTS and REQUIRES massive oversight.
Running a business ethically takes far more money than anyone wants to admit.
Running a business while making sure you follow all government regulations, codes, is insurable, and is cost efficient is even harder.
First, get rid of for profit insurance. They should all work as collectives.
Get rid of for profit healthcare and go single payer. Remove middlemen who provide no benefit. Quit overpaying shit like salesmen because they’re a clear tick that shows more $$$$ and pay people nicely. A housekeeper making $40,000 shouldn’t be $50,000 away from their manager and shouldn’t be $400,000 or more away from their President. Quit overvaluing and paying a rich person to what amounts to having to have someone dedicated to sucking up to other rich people to stay alive.
Understand that the stock market only works with infinite growth. You will need to save up exactly what you plan to use in retirement without the magic of it or compounding interest and redistribute the wealth through unionizing, and collective bargaining.
Understand that all of it takes someone to lead and do it that will need to be paid as well. People want to live their lives happily, not sacrifice themselves and their life out of some noble goodness of their heart. Pay them appropriately and understand that if you’re in these positions, you shouldn’t be paid double what other people make just because you do important work. We all do.
Remember that it takes more people to run anything that we like to admit, and that often these regulations are there for a reason. Find the real fat, and cut it while you can.
Seriously though, blame for profit businesses that should just be government run if they’re a requirement. Insurance/public health, safety/audit oversight, infrastructure, utilities, public health.
Push for cooperatives for things that can be more privatized but get sketchy when it’s all government or full on for profit, like private land ownership, private schools, banking to credit unions.
I agree with the general thrust of what you’re saying, but your comment includes several contradictions. You imply that $400,000 a year is far too high a salary for a president of a company, but then you suggest that we should pay top dollar for a competent leader. You say we shouldn’t be angry at the manager making $40,000 more than us, but you also say to remove unnecessary middlemen.
Generally, I think all of that is unnecessary considerations. As you said, some things just require a lot of people to physically be present for oversight and require a lot of regulations. Where these things are necessary for society, they should be paid for at least in part by taxes. It is immoral to have the bulk of this labor be done on the backs of uncompensated people. It is also immoral to set them up such that only the very wealthy can afford them. The only way to reconcile these two economic facts are through making them a publicly funded service.
where are college professors living in their cars?
everywhere there are professors.
It’s very common in the US.
https://fox59.com/news/national-world/ucla-professor-says-hes-homeless-due-to-low-pay/amp/
https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/homeless-professor-who-lives-her-car
You do know these are all about the same lady from 7 years ago. Stop living in the past.
It’s a little more complicated than that. I think the factors are:
- part-time adjunct vs full-time
- research vs non
- type of college (prestige, size, focus)
- what you do in summers
- field
So for example you could be a machine learning Research Professor (non-tenure-track) in a first-tier university and bring in a lot of money through grants. Or you could be a tenured teaching professor at a smaller college and not work in summers and make a mid-level income. Or you could be a part-time instructor (e.g., adjunct faculty) in the humanities and make very little.
Typically, the amount of grant money you receive does not affect your salary. It can affect your job security and it can be a factor in earning tenure, but in general, writing more grant proposals=/=higher pay (just more money for research).
Plus, even at R1 schools, tenure-track positions are often starting out with pretty low pay compared to tuition and very low compared what the professor could be making in private industry. According to this study by National Center for Educational Statistics, only about a third of college budgets are spent on instruction, with about another third on support services (counselors, financial aid, tutoring/library services, accessibility services, etc.), with the remainder spent on administration. But that doesn’t look so bad until you realize that at most schools, 50%-75% of the courses are not taught by full-time instructors, but by adjuncts, and adjuncts are often paid at or below the poverty line (about 25k/year in 2020). Even as a tenured instructor with 10 years of salary schedule advancements and a partner with a full-time job in higher education, I’m still living paycheck-to-paycheck.
So, yes, it is more complicated than “all professors are underpaid,” but not by much. It’s really more like “75% of college instructors are near or below poverty level.”
Agree with the above, with the exception of summer work which is unrelated to what they make from being professors. If you are a college professor and need to keep a second job to keep the roof over your head, then I think the point stands.
Community college professor here. I’m lucky enough to be tenured at this point, but when I started teaching, I was making just enough money such that if I had been paying the going rate for rent edit: and health insurance, I would have been losing about $100/month, before taking into account other expenses like food (or health insurance or gas or utilities…) (edit: I went back and checked numbers, my memory was a little off). And that was with me teaching 75% at two different schools (so, a total of about 24 units per term when full-time is usually 16 units per term)
I was privileged enough to be able to live with family while I pursued a full-time position and extra work, but many are not so lucky.
So, yeah, college professors are drastically underpaid, on par with K-12 teachers
I don’t know, tenure track professors doing research, probably not. But the cost of living here is kind of insane. If we didn’t have a double income, my wife would have to take a pretty substantial downgrade in where she lives. Cost of living is getting out of hand everywhere regardless, and the point still stands I think.
There’s really a two tiered structure to academia that seems to be hidden from most students. Maybe even 3 tiered. There’s the tenure-track research faculty who might teach one class per semester (often less) - they’re still underpaid relative to industry equivalent jobs, but they get their research freedom and low six figures after a few years while bringing in seven figure research grants for the university. Mid-six-figures if they’re upper admin. There’s non-tenure-track adjuncts & academic professionals who teach 3-5 classes per semester, often at multiple universities because no one will give them enough classes to live on, doing the bulk of a university’s teaching, especially at ‘tier 1 research’ universities, and they’re lucky to get median salary. There’s also a set of tenure-track faculty at universities without big research programs who teach 2-3 classes, maybe do a little bit of research or literature review, but probably without any significant extramural funding. They get paid somewhere in between.
They all get called “professor;” they all have PhDs; there’s infighting to keep the faculty as a whole from rising up. I used to tell my students they (or someone on their bahalf) paid about $200 for each of my lectures, and they’re free to skip them if they want, but even in a tiny seminar, 10 students, $2000/hour revenue, the highest paid professors are only getting 5% of that (not accounting for out-of-class effort).
Weird that pro capitalist comments with 10 to 50 upvotes are by default above anti corporation takes with 100-200 upvotes.
Capitalism combined with markets with inelastic demand is a lot of fun. But communism bad because tankies or whatever.
Unchecked greed is bad for society, capitalist or communist.
People are the problem. If we could only get rid of the people. /sarcasm
Bad because the centralized planning committee is little better than ONE BOARDROOM TO RULE THEM ALL and if you disagree with them they send their secret police to yank a black bag over your head and disappear you in the night. Then you, everyone you associated with, and everyone within three generations related to you spend the rest of your short, brutal, agonizing existences starving and/or freezing to death at a slavery camp in the wilderness.
