I think people would find disparate outcomes among gender/race/etc. and claim discrimination. This will lead to more uniformity as employers try to avoid legal and political liability, however unfounded the claims of discrimination are. The not-so-subtle point that unequal outcomes don't mean discrimination seems to be totally lost in political discourse.

You're right that doctors and lawyers are not great examples for the reasons you state.

If everyone knows what everyone makes, it becomes much harder to give an excellent employee more money. Everyone thinks they deserve a raise, so now a manager has to confront the rest of the team when he gives one person a raise. Envy is a very powerful force.

Performance for this purpose doesn't need to be measured in OneTrueWay, the market provides a better solution: at what point your employer is willing to see you walk to another job instead of paying you more. (They may have their own formal performance ranking system, but if it's not very good they'll lose the battle for talent.) This has the side effect that assertive people are at an advantage, but I don't think that's a bad thing.

As for CEOs, that's a very interesting point. My intuition is that it's a totally different kind of market. The CEO is the boss, not one among many equals. And you can't deny that the information has stirred up animosity and resentment toward the CEO class, however ill- or well-founded that sentiment is.

> If everyone knows what everyone makes, it becomes much harder to give an excellent employee more money. Everyone thinks they deserve a raise, so now a manager has to confront the rest of the team when he gives one person a raise. Envy is a very powerful force.

I think economic modeling moves towards the opposite direction. First, people assume that other people make and still have that envy, and in that assumption they make mistakes. But there are severely underpaid people that would immediately get a better deal.

There are other interesting externality is that knowing what people make would allow people to jump jobs a lot clearer. One of my crusades in public opinion in argentina is that the salaries of college graduates is absolutely unknown, making it impossible to gauge how valuable each college degree is worth. Hence, lots of people commit to dead-end careers. If it were known how much the graduates made, less people would go there, and more people would go to the paying ones.

Same with jobs: knowing other company pays substantially more will move you, increasing the salary of the low paying companies and lowering the salary of the high paying companies.

In a very naive way, the lack of information prevents market efficiency, because if the information where there, people would do more and different trades. And this is algo good for companies in the long run, because they would more effectively attract the appropriate talent.

Think of it as any other market: housing for example. Is housing clearer or worse by having house sale prices open?

This doesn't happen in practice though. 99% of adults realize that different performance leads to difference in salary. 99% of adults can understand why their coworker gets paid more than them.

The "market solution" only awards to the best negotiators.

99% of adults? Tell that the "70 cents on the dollar" people. Half of America is walking around believing that women get paid 70 cents on the dollar for equal work, when that is not the case at all. The data is that the average pay of all women is 70% of the average pay of all men, which doesn't even try to account for the nature of the work, and is obviously highly confounded by career choice.

I think public wage data is more likely to reduce that kind of misconception than accelerate it.

Personally I think I've gone a bit deeper in this topic, because I also think that if taxes were public, people with the same job but different tax situation will have a different bargaining position, meaning salaries will be affected by the actual tax rates people pay.

I'm also interested in the visible effects of wealth and income regarding wages: do people with some money in the bank earn more money in general? (would it thus mean that the best investment is to get some cash first ?) etc.

For the more emotional argument, wouldn't public wages also prevent people with lower incomes giving money to higher incomes? Something that happens often is many human relationships where wealth can be hidden? Wouldn't you tip higher to the waitress you know is gaining well below what you think she would, and wouldn you demand more of your boss if you knew exactly how much more they made?

I'm not going to say its strictly better for everyone to have the information public, but I can rarely fathom believing that hiding information leads to better decisions. And isn't that what its all about. At this moment all these objections are a sort of growing pain, not objections for the long term.