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Salaries

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Economists and experts on wages have long tried to discover

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what factors were influencing people’s salaries.

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Most of the factors they listed one or two centuries ago

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are still important today.

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One of those is education: college graduates have earned

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and are still earning more than workers

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who have only finished high school,

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and high-school graduates earn more than workers

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who didn’t complete their studies there.

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The difficulty and length of preparation for a profession

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also plays a part in the size of the salary.

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Danger and responsibility make a difference too —

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the man or woman in charge of a project,

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the person performing a difficult or dangerous task,

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the airplane pilot responsible for many human lives,

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usually get a proper compensation for their pains.

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And yet there are exceptions to those rules.

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Due to the needs of modern industry,

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technicians with no college education are now commanding high salaries,

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much closer to the college graduates'salaries

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than they used to be in the past.

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And there are many jobs in which danger

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doesn’t bring much compensation.

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Why doesn’t a fireman earn more than a postal clerk, for example?

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And what about the policeman and the coal miner,

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who risk their lives for a modest salary?

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The answer is simple.

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Actually, salaries are governed by a combination of factors,

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the most important being one known as the law of supply and demand,

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which says that the value of goods and services

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is determined by the quantity available

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compared with the number of possible buyers.

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If there are more chickens on the market than people wishing to buy them,

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the price of poultry goes down.

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If the number of specialized engineers

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is much larger than the number of positions open to them,

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the salaries drop even for the most impressive applicants.