It is interesting that you are gauging my "success" on whether my comment is changing minds about economic theory. Please consider that I explicitly excluded anything else Marx wrote from assent, to reduce the likelihood that anyone would mistake my argument for Fully Automated Luxury Communism or whatever the kids are calling it these days.
I am explicitly arguing that value and wages are not tied to each other, today, with examples.
Generally speaking, we treat the value of labor in accord with the cost of developing a skill. Whether by correlation or accident, this seems to mean we dramatically undervalue softer skills involved in working with other people. (NB: This is related to, but very different than the customer service face front-of-house puts on.) There are kitchens where the entire morale of the restaurant staff rests on the good natured attitude of the dishwasher. That person leaves, and soon afterwards, everybody hates working there, and nobody can figure out why.
I think any sane businessperson knows this, and does agree with me. Most businesspersons also know that everyone in a restaurant is completely replaceable. Right?
Respectfully, I believe you are wrong about value of labor.
It seems to be much more based on supply & demand.
If everyone could do it, and there were no demand, the value would be low.
A quick way to check this is to look at expensive college programs where people come out making much less than the cost of their education. If you were correct, then such situation would not occur.
(And yes, I’m aware you said “generally”, because must even generally I think it’s incorrect. )
How does anything I typed conflict with the basic macroeconomic pressures of supply and demand? Labor markets have those tensions, and the useful thing to understand are the factors influencing supply & demand.
Applying market theory to labor/employer relations, says that wages should tend to go up, if the demand (job openings) for a particular kind of labor exceeds the supply (pool of people who can & will do those jobs). But talking about how labor gets priced by markets doesn't explain anything about why governments choose the minimum wage (if any) that they do. Minimum wage is an explicitly moral consideration where we compel the demand side to observe a floor on the price of your time.
> If everyone could do it, and there were no demand, the value would be low.
That just muddles the separate mechanisms. If everyone has the skill for a job, the potential labor pool is as large as it possibly can be, so supply pressure is naturally higher. You are correct to say that demand pressure is what then drives a negotiated wage. But that's just table stakes to understand what an economy is actually composed of. Does this region have a highly skilled workforce, with demand outpacing the supply of workers, thus driving wages up? Congratulations! This means your region has a proportionally lower supply of low skilled workers, which creates upward market pressure on wages. Using the lens of supply and demand means you now need to look for explanations when the demand for unskilled labor doesn't go down, which is what it would take to keep wages constant.
And the value a supplier (worker) assigns to their own time? Demand pressure only indirectly influences a person's perception of value. People get born into a variety of different financial circumstances that alter their negotiating position.
> A quick way to check this is to look at expensive college programs where people come out making much less than the cost of their education. If you were correct, then such situation would not occur.
As respectfully as possible: this is nonsense. There are all sorts of externalities involved in paying for an education that would never be captured by the labor market model. If somebody is paying a lot of money to develop some skill that has low ROI in the labor market, the only thing that signals is that the person getting the "useless" degree must value having that skill for non-monetary reasons. This kind of thing is always a problem when talking about economics as the science of rational agents. Even if the market demand for a particular skill is zero, some people will use money to develop that skill anyway. This observed fact does not remotely invalidate anything I've said.
In answer to your first question, I keyed in on this comment that you made in the OP: "Generally speaking, we treat the value of labor in accord with the cost of developing a skill."
Physics degrees are awfully hard to get, and yet for every physicist, there are surely many more sales people who get paid more.
I am explicitly arguing that value and wages are not tied to each other, today, with examples.
Generally speaking, we treat the value of labor in accord with the cost of developing a skill. Whether by correlation or accident, this seems to mean we dramatically undervalue softer skills involved in working with other people. (NB: This is related to, but very different than the customer service face front-of-house puts on.) There are kitchens where the entire morale of the restaurant staff rests on the good natured attitude of the dishwasher. That person leaves, and soon afterwards, everybody hates working there, and nobody can figure out why.
I think any sane businessperson knows this, and does agree with me. Most businesspersons also know that everyone in a restaurant is completely replaceable. Right?