do you have a story for why the public sector remained okay for ~200 years (if it did)?
I less have this sense for the last 200 years than for the preceding 2000 years, but I think for most of human history ‘white collar’ work has been heavily affiliated with the public sector (which, for most of human history, I think should count the church). Quite possibly the thing we’re seeing is a long-term realignment where more and more administrative and intellectual ability is being deployed by the private sector instead of the public sector, both because the private sector is more able to compete on compensation and non-financial compensation has degraded in relative performance? [For example, ambitious people are less interested in the steady stability of a career track now than I think they were 100 years ago, and more and more public sector work is done in the ‘steady career track’ way. The ability to provide for a family mattered much more for finding a spouse before the default was a two-income family. Having a ‘good enough’ salary mattered more than having a shot at a stellar salary in a smaller world.]
Another thing I note is that there’s variation in cultural push for various sorts of service; disproportionately many military recruits come from the South and rural areas, for example. Part of this is economic, but I think even more of it is cultural / social (in the sense of knowing and respecting more people who were in the military, coming from a culture that values martial virtues over pacifism, and so on). Hamming’s book on doing scientific research, which was adapted from classes he taught at the Naval Postgraduate School, focuses on doing science for social good instead of private benefit, in a way that feels very different from modern Silicon Valley startup culture (and even from earlier Silicon Valley startup culture, which felt much more connected to the national defense system).
It wouldn’t surprise me if there were simply more children who grew up wanting to be public servants in the past because it was viewed more favorably then. It also wouldn’t surprise me if more bits of society are detaching from each other, where it’s less and less likely that there are (say) police officers or members of the military in any particular social group, except for social groups that have very heavy representation of those groups. (Of the rationalists I know socially, I think they’re at least ten times as likely to publicly state “ACAB” than to have ever considered being a police officer themselves, and I predict this will be even more skewed in the next generation of rationalists.) I know a lot of people who wanted to be teachers or professors because those were the primary adults that they spent time around; perhaps the non-academia public sector is also losing that recruitment battle (relative to the private sector, at least)?
My sense is that the detachment between public and private sector salaries is relatively recent, is concentrated in the higher ranks of the organization, and is driven in large part by greater economic integration and expansion; executive salary roughly tracks the logarithm of organization size, and private sector organizations have gotten much larger than they were 200 years ago. Public sector organizations have also gotten much larger, but haven’t been able to increase compensation accordingly.
I less have this sense for the last 200 years than for the preceding 2000 years, but I think for most of human history ‘white collar’ work has been heavily affiliated with the public sector (which, for most of human history, I think should count the church). Quite possibly the thing we’re seeing is a long-term realignment where more and more administrative and intellectual ability is being deployed by the private sector instead of the public sector, both because the private sector is more able to compete on compensation and non-financial compensation has degraded in relative performance? [For example, ambitious people are less interested in the steady stability of a career track now than I think they were 100 years ago, and more and more public sector work is done in the ‘steady career track’ way. The ability to provide for a family mattered much more for finding a spouse before the default was a two-income family. Having a ‘good enough’ salary mattered more than having a shot at a stellar salary in a smaller world.]
Another thing I note is that there’s variation in cultural push for various sorts of service; disproportionately many military recruits come from the South and rural areas, for example. Part of this is economic, but I think even more of it is cultural / social (in the sense of knowing and respecting more people who were in the military, coming from a culture that values martial virtues over pacifism, and so on). Hamming’s book on doing scientific research, which was adapted from classes he taught at the Naval Postgraduate School, focuses on doing science for social good instead of private benefit, in a way that feels very different from modern Silicon Valley startup culture (and even from earlier Silicon Valley startup culture, which felt much more connected to the national defense system).
It wouldn’t surprise me if there were simply more children who grew up wanting to be public servants in the past because it was viewed more favorably then. It also wouldn’t surprise me if more bits of society are detaching from each other, where it’s less and less likely that there are (say) police officers or members of the military in any particular social group, except for social groups that have very heavy representation of those groups. (Of the rationalists I know socially, I think they’re at least ten times as likely to publicly state “ACAB” than to have ever considered being a police officer themselves, and I predict this will be even more skewed in the next generation of rationalists.) I know a lot of people who wanted to be teachers or professors because those were the primary adults that they spent time around; perhaps the non-academia public sector is also losing that recruitment battle (relative to the private sector, at least)?
My sense is that the detachment between public and private sector salaries is relatively recent, is concentrated in the higher ranks of the organization, and is driven in large part by greater economic integration and expansion; executive salary roughly tracks the logarithm of organization size, and private sector organizations have gotten much larger than they were 200 years ago. Public sector organizations have also gotten much larger, but haven’t been able to increase compensation accordingly.