英语沙龙：Salaries（在线收听）

Salaries

Economists and experts on wages have long tried to discover

what factors were influencing people’s salaries.

Most of the factors they listed one or two centuries ago

are still important today.

One of those is education: college graduates have earned

and are still earning more than workers

who have only finished high school,

and high-school graduates earn more than workers

who didn’t complete their studies there.

The difficulty and length of preparation for a profession

also plays a part in the size of the salary.

Danger and responsibility make a difference too —

the man or woman in charge of a project,

the person performing a difficult or dangerous task,

the airplane pilot responsible for many human lives,

usually get a proper compensation for their pains.

And yet there are exceptions to those rules.

Due to the needs of modern industry,

technicians with no college education are now commanding high salaries,

much closer to the college graduates'salaries

than they used to be in the past.

And there are many jobs in which danger

doesn’t bring much compensation.

Why doesn’t a fireman earn more than a postal clerk, for example?

And what about the policeman and the coal miner,

who risk their lives for a modest salary?

The answer is simple.

Actually, salaries are governed by a combination of factors,

the most important being one known as the law of supply and demand,

which says that the value of goods and services

is determined by the quantity available

compared with the number of possible buyers.

If there are more chickens on the market than people wishing to buy them,

the price of poultry goes down.

If the number of specialized engineers

is much larger than the number of positions open to them,

the salaries drop even for the most impressive applicants.