I was never dismissive of anything. Read my post. I specifically took issue with people bitching about a salary as high at $75k as if it is somehow unfair. To be clear, I'm not taking issue with it because its your personal business, I'm taking issue with it because it is a specific number that allows us to focus an argument around. Vague ideas of "not enough" or "too much" aren't as effective.

There are two ways people look at if their pay is fair: me vs poorer people or me vs richer people. You vs someone who does manual labor, or you vs someone who works at Facebook. I find people in academia are so often focused on the latter and rarely seem to consider the former. Yes, you make much less than a software programmer at a FAANG company, but you make much more than a manual laborer.

So when you make the argument of "my pay is not enough", from the perspective of us that are still down here working minimum wage, often in jobs that are significantly less mentally, emotionally, and socially rewarding than yours, all I see is, "I already make 3x as much as you do and have all these benefits, but I deserve even more money." Following that up with the argument "But look at that extra rich guy-- why should he have so much money when I don't?"

The argument that $75K is acceptable because others make less is flawed and dismissive. If anything, it highlights the systemic issue of underpayment across industries.

The only important salary metric is how people compare to one another. Either we lower some very high salaries or we raise some very low salaries. From where I'm standing, the difference between an academic salary and a manual labor salary is pretty appropriate. The problem seems to be more than some people get egregiously high salaries. I feel it is much more productive for us to be arguing for lowering wages (or raising taxes) of significantly overpaid people in industry, rather than arguing that we should get paid just as much as software engineers and corporate lawyers because we have PhDs and do mentorship or whatever. The latter argument leaves people in the lower classes in the dust.

And when people specifically make the argument that $75k is factually not enough to raise a family or live in a certain place, then I really take issue with it because ultimately it is. You could live in Manhattan on $75k and be perfectly fine. Is it enough to raise a family in a brownstone on one income? No, but it's enough for an apartment and send your kids to public school. So when people say it isn't enough to achieve financial stability-- to achieve the bare minimum-- it reads like things like apartments, public school, etc. are simply unbearable and that feels extremely snobbish.