Comment by toomuchtodo

> How would a profession where your value to the company scales very directly with your talents and your pay can be very connected to those talents and has a very high celling benefit from being judged as a unit with the least competent instead of an individual on just your own contribution.

Your mental model operates under the assumption that you are paid for your individual performance. This leads you to believe organizing is suboptimal. But, the data does not show individual performance is tied to compensation, therefore you're arguing against a model based on a meritocracy fallacy and an incomplete mental model. You might also overweight your own performance vs that of others, in the same way that a majority of drivers believe themselves to be better than the average driver.

Understandably, it is hard to internalize that we are not special, that performance is hard to measure, and that organizations communicate something different than reality. "Show me the incentives and I'll show you the outcome."

"I am a gambler and I don't want my upside restricted" is more honest than "the profession shouldn't organize because a small cohort will miss out on outsized comp that they can work hard and are recognized for." Also, importantly, you asked "how would a profession ... benefit" when you really mean just the folks at the top of the income distribution, not the entire profession. One might also consider that pay transparency laws exist because of well known and researched pay inequity issues across wide swaths of the economy.

> When asked about the rationale for the size of their paycheck, both workers and executives overwhelmingly point to one factor: Individual performance. And yet research shows that this belief is false and largely based on three myths people have about their pay: that you can separate it from the performance of others; that your job has an objective, agreed-upon definition of performance; and that paying for individual performance improves organizational outcomes. Instead, your pay is defined by four organizational forces: power, inertia, mimicry, and equity. The bad news is that these dynamics have reshaped the economy to benefit the few at the expense of the many. The good news is that, if pay isn’t some predetermined, rigid reflection of performance, then we can imagine a different world in terms of who is paid what, and how. -- Jake Rosenfeld, a top scholar of the US labor market.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Myth_of_meritocracy

https://hbr.org/2021/02/youre-not-paid-based-on-your-perform...