Are you paid what you're worth? - by Brian Albrecht

You are reading Economic Forces, a free weekly newsletter on economics, especially price theory, without the politics. Economic Forces arrives weekly in the inboxes of over 12,000 subscribers. You can support our newsletter by sharing this free post or becoming a paid subscriber: Upgrade to paid Share Everyone thinks they’re underpaid. Everyone thinks they have to overpay for other stuff. In policy debates, we see this overpay idea when critics deride certain companies—often larger, often tech-related—as undeservedly "taxing" consumers, workers, or other companies. Outsized profits or charges supposedly demonstrate exploitation from market dominance rather than fair (to whom?) returns. But this taxation metaphor is argument by wordplay. What is a tax? What constitutes unearned profits versus legitimate competitive payoffs? And how precisely do companies extract surplus compared to value created? Are we stuck with just arbitrary comparisons of what feels like “too high” of a price? One

You are reading Economic Forces, a free weekly newsletter on economics, especially price theory, without the politics. Economic Forces arrives weekly in the inboxes of over 12,000 subscribers. You can support our newsletter by sharing this free post or becoming a paid subscriber: Upgrade to paid Share Everyone thinks they’re underpaid. Everyone thinks they have to overpay for other stuff. In policy debates, we see this overpay idea when critics deride certain companies—often larger, often tech-related—as undeservedly "taxing" consumers, workers, or other companies. Outsized profits or charges