unobserved skill

Rakesh Bhandari bhandari at phoenix.Princeton.EDU
Wed Oct 14 21:15:28 PDT 1998


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



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