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Technology has precipitated an explosion in the number and depth of special skills needed to support an economy. Assuming a basic education, some skills require only minutes to acquire. Others take years of intense study and practice. Some, once acquired, are put to work almost effortlessly. They become natural and automatic. All they consume is time and physical energy. For other mentally creative skills, applying them is every day as hard as was the process of learning them. I notice how much more sleep I need when engaged in long-term mental creativity than I need when applying an automatic skill - be it mental or physical.
The remuneration a person receives from his future employment therefore has to justify his investment in terms of:
The injustice of employment within a capitalist free market is that a person's remuneration in a job is based on none of these.
Morally, one should be rewarded at least according to the effort and dedication one puts into one's work. But morality has no part with capitalism. By fair economic exchange, one should be rewarded at least according to the productive yield of one's effort. But this is not the way it works either. Fair exchange has no part with capitalism. Capitalism is not - and as far as I know, does not even claim to be - fair. The 'return on investment' of one's time spent working for an employer within the capitalist free market is determined, like everything else, purely by the market forces of supply and demand.
As technology advances, the disparity in skill levels it requires accelerates. Education and training in the higher skills occupies a greater and greater portion of a person's working life. As technology advances, the demand life-span of such a skill becomes shorter and shorter. We are at the point where the time taken to acquire a skill is becoming longer than the time over which it will be saleable. The threshold of chaos in supply and demand is rapidly approaching. This could create a sudden excess of rocket scientists, making them '10 a penny'. It could equally create a sudden shortage of floor sweepers, making them each worth a king's ransom. Rocket scientists - for all their years of personal effort, expensive education and training - would thus become better off downshifting to floor sweepers. Their years of formative effort would then have been all for nothing.
My daughter had a reasonable job in a merchant bank. After having worked for 3 years from leaving the 6th form, she decided to spend 3 years taking a degree. It was a big investment. She gave up her income and 'lived on porridge' so to speak. She was falsely led to believe that a degree would lead to a better job. Now, 3 years after having gained her degree, she is yet to acquire a job which pays anything like the salary she had before taking her degree. Her current job is supremely boring and is driving her to despair. It demands absolutely none of the extra knowledge and skill she gained from her degree. She is not unemployed but she is certainly inappropriately employed.
The force of supply and demand is not the only force acting within the market. There are other forces at large which influence the going rate for a particular skill. These tend to moderate - or even out - the extreme effects of supply and demand. They act like a damper in a car suspension or the graphite rods in a nuclear reactor.
One of these is the force of collectivism. This drives the members of a given trade or profession to form themselves into a guild, a union or a professional institute. Acting together, the members of such instruments of restrictive practice establish and hold for their skill an accepted status within the social hierarchy. This status in turn gives rise to a generally accepted 'going rate' relative to other skills and professions.
The other major influence is subjective perception. Where no collective voice exists, the applying of a skill is rewarded only according to its value as perceived by they who hold the purse strings of the industry concerned. These people are inevitably accountants, administrators and managers. They rarely have any direct notion of the depth of technical content of the skills they presume to evaluate. They are nonetheless invariably positive that such skills have nothing approaching the value of their own, or of skills whose values are determined by restrictive practice.
The result is that many skills are undervalued while others are overvalued according to how they are perceived by those who control the purse. The notion of money being a means of providing fair exchange of one's skilled effort for those of another has lost all integrity. One person may apply hard-acquired skills for long hours for little monetary reward while another applies deftness, casually acquired, for which wealth drops into his lap. Money and value thus have a distorted and convoluted relationship like points on a warped membrane, which has been randomly stretched and compressed.
How does capitalist money perform as a means of exchange? What is a dollar? What is a pound? Ten minutes of my effort? 100 seconds of yours? By what yardstick? Who is qualified to say? Certainly not any subjective observer. And that rules out all human beings. Nevertheless, self-appointed rulers called capitalists presume to decree the monetary values of other people's skills. Consequently, for as long as capitalism rules, gross unfairness and extreme disparity will reign. But there is a solution.