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Are you suggesting that the difference in skill level between a burger flipper and an accountant is purely subjective?



Since that depends on the burger flipper, I'd say yes. Gordon Ramsay would likely agree.


That's just playing with words. Putting Gordon Ramsay in the same bucket as "burger flipper" makes as much sense as putting Linus Torvalds in the same bucket as "keyboard monkey".


The distinction I suppose is that what you really mean is "the difference in [necessary] skill level between a burger flipper and an accountant".


Not skill - that's an internal metric not an external one. The difference is between what people will pay for that skill.


Perspective actually. And what you perceive to be value.


Why are you pivoting to "value"? The original discussion was about skilled vs unskilled labor and whether that assessment is subjective vs objective. You might think that accountants are useless paper pushers whereas burger flippers are Hard Working People That Get Actual Things Done™, but that's orthogonal to how much skill[1] is needed to flip burgers vs be an accountant.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skill_(labor)


Pivoting to nothing.

> Skilled workers have long had historical import...

Value, import(ance); potatoe, potartoe.


So you're trying to derail the discussion to something about "value", because the page I linked about "skill" has a passage about how skilled laborers were historically important to the economy? What does this have to do with the subjectivity/objectivity of "underpaid", "unfair wages", "unskilled labor", or whether a burger flipper is more "skilled" than an accountant? As I said earlier, even if you think that accountants are useless paper pushers, the fact that they're pushing papers in a very specific way that takes years to learn, makes them more skilled.


First I'm pivoting now I'm trying to derail, when all I've done is answer you question; but to make it plain: yes, it's subjective. How else are certain skills valued more that others? There's no objective measurement to these. Comparing the skills of one disapline to another doesn't work, like apple to oranges.


The objective measurement for "skill" is how much training/experience/talent is required to carry out a particular job. Sure, there might be some fuzziness/ambiguity to this, and there's various degrees of freedom to how you compute a "skill score" or whatever (eg. what's more skilled an accountant or an auditor?), but it's hard to argue that a burger flipper is more skilled than an accountant. You can make the argument that the value of a burger flipper vs an accountant is subjective, but that's irrespective of the skill required.

Whether someone is getting "underpaid" or a "fair wage" on the other hand is entirely subjective, and you can come to whatever conclusion you want depending on your politics. On one side of the spectrum you could argue any sort of situation where the employer is capturing surplus value from the employee is inherently exploitative[1] and therefore "underpaid" and a "unfair wage". On the other end of the spectrum you argue that supply and demand curves are the ultimate arbiter of what's "fair", and any wage that is determined by the free market can't by "underpaid" or "unfair" by definition.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Labor_theory_of_value


Yeah I don't think we're going to agree about skills in this, especially since I'd consider usefulness as a main objective measurement of skill. Using your "objective" measures could lead to a juggler of knives having the same level of skill as your accountant.


With the two examples you chose, I‘d say there is not much of a skill gap.

If you‘d have chosen a burger flipper and an aeronautical engineer or a surgeon, I‘d have agreed with you.


> With the two examples you chose, I‘d say there is not much of a skill gap.

Unless we're talking about really high end burgers, you can take almost anyone off the street and train them to flip burger patties within a day. They might not willingly do it on account of it being boring/tiring/poorly paid work, but it's not exactly hard to learn either. I doubt you can do the same for an accountant, unless your idea of an accountant is something like "manually copying entries into a ledger". Even teaching excel to someone who hasn't used excel ever, to a capacity where they can do meaningful financial reporting probably can't be done within a day.


On a relative scale, I agree with you that the amount of training involved differs for accountants and burger flippers, thus this is a good example.

On an absolute scale, comparing skills of burger flippers, accountants, aeronautical engineers and surgeons, the first two basically lump together.

I look at skill gap more in terms of „how hard is it to completely automate/autonomize this job“. Which is fiercely easy both for the burger flipper and the accountant, yet a bit harder (though not impossible) for the other two.




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