Gross salaries and their causes
On convenience-store clerks, minding the gap, and the real reasons why some people take home bigger paychecks than their peers elsewhere
Confirmation bias can be a powerful drug. It can be downright intoxicating to reach a conclusion first and then go in search of all kinds of reasons to support it. Just such a case appears in the pages of the San Francisco Chronicle.
■ Under the headline, “This Cal State program produces some of the country’s highest-paid grads“, the Chronicle publishes a story that hails the phenomenal success of a four-year nursing degree program at Cal State East Bay, celebrating a report saying that graduates of the program earn the highest starting salaries of any nursing program in the nation.
■ The Chronicle finds several reasons affirming the high incomes, including a strong labor union presence, regulations on nurse-to-patient ratios, and the quality of the program itself. But the story overlooks entirely the causal effects of a massive contributor to those high wages: San Francisco is an eye-wateringly expensive place to live.
■ The extraordinarily high cost of living makes just one tiny appearance in the story, when a current student is described as living with her parents and commuting to campus at a cost of $450 a month. Unfortunately, this is treated merely as a colorful anecdote rather than as an explanation.
■ It matters because one of the best pieces of advice anyone can give to a young person just starting out is, “Maximize the gap between your compensation (in all its forms) and what you have to give up to get it.” Anyone can earn a high income -- San Francisco doesn’t just have highly-paid nurses, it has some of the nation’s best-paid convenience-store clerks, too -- but if that high income evaporates in extremely high rents, time-wasting commutes, and a sky-high cost of living, then the resulting gap may be quite small.
■ Money isn’t everything; people are often compensated in psychic rewards, free time, and the gratitude of others. But it’s journalistic malpractice to lead a round of cheers for high incomes without deducing that high expenses are a main factor driving those incomes upward. Bloated self-congratulations over high incomes that overlook the inevitability of local market forces (as both a driving factor in those high incomes and a mitigating factor in how much they can be enjoyed) don’t really tell the full story.
