Boxes, Foreheads, and Price Signals  Russ Roberts at Cafe Hayek
has an illuminating post about how to think about jobs:  Some
say that a nation should strive to acquire high-paying jobs if
it wants a high standard of living. In this view of the world,
jobs are boxes that workers jump in and out of. Each box has a
bar code that determines how much the job pays. The goal is to
get a good box with a high wage attached to it.An alternative
view of the world is that the bar code is on the worker’s
forehead. The worker gets scanned not the job.The wage depends
not on the job title but on the skills of the worker.  Russ goes
on to explain why the jobs-as-boxes view leads to error and
confusion.  I’d like to add that one of the reasons unions and
other forms of subsidy often hurt workers more than they help is
because of certain implications of the box view. Unions
generally try to get the wages and benefits attached to union
boxes as high as feasibly possible.  The first effect is often
to limit the number of boxes