Ross Weeks Jr. wrote:
>
> This isn't to beg the question, but to pose a question -- what SHOULD a
> starting salary in the museum field be?  Possibly those who have complained
> (for good reason) might offer advice instead.
>
> One recent writer reported that $18,000 a year in a museum was not enough
> (in a two-income family) to pay for the kind of life she and her husband
> wanted in Arizona.
>

<lots of snippage>

Salaries are never paid according the kind of life people want to
live...goodness knows I wish they were!

Salaries are paid according to what the employer thinks the job is worth
and what it takes to get someone into the job. Since museums and several
other fields (such as science where I previously worked) have little or
no trouble finding people to fill jobs at the wages offered, there is
little or no incentive to raise salaries. Whether or not they are
getting the 'best' people is difficult to say. On the one hand, the
people they are getting usually *really* want to work there (as in my
case both in the museum and in the lab), so they are likely to make the
most useful contributions.On the other hand if one is after the business
end of running a museum then business-type salaries are likely to
attract the sort of people who will make the best business
contributions. In an ideal place (which no museum or lab ever is) there
would be no difference in salaries.

(Incidentally the line about 'young and fiery' made me laugh. In my
experience, in the lab anyway, the 'young' and only occasionally 'fiery'
people contributed very little until they'd mastered their art as it
were. Having good ideas is really very easy...it usually takes training
and experience to make them work.)