The other day I was talking to a friend about some mutual acquaintances and when we meandered into the topic of jobs, titles, and pay (as almost every conversation I have these days seems to), we started talking about a mutual acquaintance who I had thought had moved and I was thrilled because out of sight, out of mind, as they say. My friend stopped my rejoicing short, saying with serious, hushed voice, “I have some bad news for you…[s]he makes $250,000 at [workplace inserted here].” I was stopped short but not for why you might think.
Now, I have a lot of reasons to really hate this news because, to be simple, it’s an injustice. My friend and I both know this person, we both agree this person is, in some facets of personhood, reprehensible and in some facets just sad. Not a genius, not even clever, and with a lot of personal qualities that strike us as gross. Not incredibly talented or some wunderkind when it comes to their industry. We all know one or more people who fall into this category: it’s just not fair that they’re rewarded for being willing to do what they do and be like they are. And yet, the market rewards them. And if we zoom out, we all know that the market rewards a lot of stupid and/or heinous people for being willing to do what they do. We know pay equity doesn’t exist across demographic categories, but deep down we also know that our system is lacking some major pay equity across value to society.
But remember, I was stopped short. Not because I am such a judger, not because of this news, or that my news might’ve been wrong, or that injustice like this exists in the world (I’ll come back to this in a minute). No, it was what happened next, a coinciding of me truly believing something and being able to articulate it exactly as I wanted:
“[Friend],” I said. “If we wanted to have those jobs and be successful in those jobs, we could. If we played that same game, we would be just as “successful.” But we don’t want to be that. It’s not who we are. It’s not what we value, so we do what we value and we’re happy living the life we know we want to live.”
me
Alright, listen, not everyone is a philosopher king. But what came after was the same feeling I get when I’ve written a really good paper, when I’ve made the hard but right choice, when I’ve accomplished something I think is worthy. I’d stumbled on to a “truth” for me and, shockingly, it did actually set me free.
De-Coupling Value and Pay: Why Is It So Hard?!
The problem with us over-achiever types in the US, especially if we run a little on the side of requiring external validation, is we as humans living in “civilized” society have been socialized into systems that designate a metric as “the” metric for success. We learn what “good” and “success” are, that they’re equal to each other, and that they’re rewarded sometimes even before we learn how to spell. These ideals are deeply engrained (of course, the specific meaning may differ across contexts) and the success metric is established early and often. In elementary school it’s letter grades or smiley faces or stickers on a chart; in high school and college, it’s GPA–one number to rule them all. Honestly, I learned statistics the homegrown way–that of calculating and recalculating every potential iteration of my GPA to back my way into getting a perfect one. In that same vein, we also learn that there is a race to the top, that the top is a finite space, available only to those who achieve to get there, to those who have earned that status. And then, boom, we’re adults.
Now technically, we’ll explain to children and sometimes 40-something middle aged ladies such as myself, in these systems we intended to teach young and malleable minds how to be successful. We were teaching the means to a “successful” life. In reality, though, we were indoctrinating minds into one grand narrative of success–a meritocracy–in which there are winners and losers and a spectrum in between. We were also teaching a narrative requiring one metric for success. And since we learned very early that more = better and better = success (thus by the transitive property more = success), it’s easy logic to see how we’ve come to conflate pay with social worth.
Robert Reich, one of my most favorite social thinkers of all time does a great job explaining how the myth of the meritocracy actually locks us all in to a durable, lasting structure of social inequality.
We reward billionaires an automatic “genius” status, guided by our false narrative that they must be exponentially smarter and better than us because of their pay. We’re starting to learn that a lot of it is smoke and mirrors; the truth is actually that this simpleminded, frankly incorrect, way of conflating pay and social value has and will continue to lead us astray.
Why Decoupling Value and Pay Should Be Necessary Homework For Us All
If Elon Musk’s cluelessness can teach us anything it’s that what we are paid has no bearing on our value to society. Zero. Maybe it should (and maybe it shouldn’t because I’m not sure I’m ready for that kind of hard truth if it doesn’t run in my favor) but it doesn’t. Our wealth is not a metric of our value or contribution to the world. It is a metric of how much capital we have.
“Have” does not equal “are.”
me
We, in an advanced capitalist society have a hard time de-coupling that idea but we must. The slope is slippery if we don’t. In fact, we’re starting to see this play out as we gaze across our social media and government landscapes—two place, I’d argue, that have fully embraced the notion that having more is worth celebrity and power. Anything can be bought in those worlds—and they’ve become toxic hellscapes everyone runs from with desperation in their eyes.
The reality is this—money is money. It’s a resource. Humanity is a state of being and to couple them is…”cats and dogs living together…mass hysteria (Ghostbusters, 1984). It can be done. Sure, we can try to put a price on human value but we should not.
If humanity, our own personhood and the social fabric we both make up and share, becomes definable in terms of money, we are all screwed. Most of our finest hours collectively have come down to the human spirit, the power of the collective, the anger of oppression mobilized, the purity of compassion. These are priceless.
If we priced them, Elon Musk would buy them, inject himself, and ruin them. Let’s not make humanity Twitter, okay.
And as for the gross, disgusting, $250,000-earning questionable acquaintance that both my friend and I share, the determination of what his/her skills are worth has to remain none of my business. I don’t like it. It isn’t fair or equal or just or warranted or even earned. It just “is” and I don’t have to acknowledge it as having anything to do with me.
It’s the only way the skills, the values, the worth I bring to the table can remain valuable to me. When it comes to what really matters in my world, the monetary value is often the least worthwhile factor. Afterall, if we can determine something is expensive, we can also conclude that something is cheap, chintzy, tacky, or overpriced.
I have no interest in that end.
My Tent on the Beach 