gwern comments on Political Skills which Increase Income - Less Wrong

57 Post author: Xodarap 02 March 2014 05:56PM

You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.

Article Navigation

Comments (19)
Tags: influence-tactics earn-to-give effective-altruism

Comments (19)

You are viewing a single comment's thread. Show more comments above.

Comment author: gwern 26 March 2014 09:42:43PM 3 points [-]

Pretty amazingly (I think it’s amazing) the Bureau of Labour Statistics reckons the average wage for a writer is almost exactly the same as the average wage of an engineer ($56,000), but it seems likely to me the median salary is much lower than in engineering (maybe something like $15,000-$25,000) with the mean heavily skewed by the handful of super-rich authors.

Are you sure about that? http://www.bls.gov/ooh/media-and-communication/writers-and-authors.htm reports only the median not the mean (good for them), at $55k, and in a tab gives an idea of the tails:

The lowest 10 percent earned less than $27,770, and the top 10 percent earned more than $117,860.

Comment author: Eliezer_Yudkowsky 27 March 2014 12:42:34AM 4 points [-]

Most people who write for a living are not novelists, they are marketers, technical documentation authors...

Comment author: Froolow 27 March 2014 09:32:23AM 0 points [-]

Ah yes, this makes a lot of sense and explains my earlier confusion; although it may still be true that there is a high variance in income between novelists, not all writers are novelists (for that matter, I suppose not all novelists are writers, at least as far as the BLS will bin them). I think that indicates my illustrative example is flawed, although I hope the wider point still stands.

Powered by Reddit Powered by Reddit