unobserved skill

[Rakesh Bhandari]

Enrique,
I suggested an explanation, Rosemary Crompton's not Karl Marx's, for the
hiearchy of skill intensive professions in the income structure. The nasty
comment about lawyers was unnecessary, I grant that. Moreover, you are 
correct that it would be statistically admissable to discount the low pay
of engineers and programmers on H-1 visas but there is still that
hierarchy to explain. And the argument remains that I don't think it can
be accounted for the varying skill intensity (whatever that means) of
these professions. I don't think lawyers are more skilled or have more
cognitive ability than design engineers than process engineers.  Do you
disagree?  I am truly interested in any other explanation for this
phenomenon. I don't think you will find it treated as a problem in the
bourgeois economic literature on pay, but as I noted Rosemary Crompton
makes the argument in a coauthored book (coauthor and title escape me;it's
from the mid 1970s); compare it to Phelps Brown's Inequality of Pay. 

best, rakesh