By Tom Kando
How often have you heard companies, universities and other organizations justifying their CEOs’ and administrators’ extravagant salaries on the grounds that this is necessary to compete for, and to attract, talent. We live in a meritocracy, right? The better you are, and the more useful your contribution to society is, the more money you make, right?
Maybe not. George Bernard Shaw (allegedly) said, “Those who can, do, and those who can’t, teach.” To which one could add: “Those who can’t even teach become administrators.” (Now don’t you administrator -friends of mine all get huffy. Remember, I just quoted the famous dig at teachers by George Bernard Shaw, and I am a teacher. What I added to it was just a variant of the Peter Principle).
But let me continue. I ask you: who earns the most, in any organization - those who DO the job for which the organization manifestly exists, or the “auxiliaries?” Don’t administrators make more than teachers? Don’t middlemen and advertisers make more than those who actually produce the merchandise?
Society’s
hierarchical reward system often seems inverted:
Jobs that are more essential, are frequently lower on the reward scale: For
example, college professors are paid more than primary and secondary school
teachers, yet in a fundamental sense,
the latter are more basic and necessary than the former.
Or take the medical profession: Again, who are the people most essential to societal survival - general practitioners or specialists? The former, obviously. But it’s the specialists who rake in the big bucks. And nurses do even more essential work than GPs, and they earn even less.
No job in human society is more essential than the actual picking and harvesting of the food that ends up on your table. Yet most farm workers live in poverty.
Then you have the secondary sector - manufacture. Making cars, clothes, refrigerators and houses is almost as important as producing food. But the blue collar working class is also struggling.
Of course, America and much of the Western world have become service economies. Farming now makes up 2% of our labor force, and manufacture less than 13%. We have become de-industrialized. The Industrial Revolution made (Western) Europe and the United States the factories of the world. Then, we became the office of the world. And that really pays well. But white collar work is fundamentally less important for human survival than those economic sectors which provide physical survival.
What about the jobs at the top of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs - music, movies, the arts, philosophy? Self-actualization is essential, but there is no meritocracy here either: While mediocre Hollywood blockbusters and Grammy-award winning songs rake in millions for studios and for a few superstars, quality movies and quality music get little recognition. Popular culture and mass culture - most of which is bad - are immensely more lucrative than good culture. Again, the same sort of inversion. The bad drives out the good. Public radio and public television barely stay afloat. That’s your free market at work.
So my shocking generalization/hypothesis today is that, on the whole, the more useless and mediocre you are, the more money you are likely to make. The correlation is inverse from what the meritocracy stipulates.
Actually,
I’m piggybacking on the late great Paul Goodman (Growing Up Absurd).
His insights have the brilliance which only a true 60s radical could
possess. Goodman was more concerned
about meaningful work, and he noted that schools and society encourage
young people less and less to seek out meaningful work. So I think that I am in good company.
I
hope that you have a sense of irony.
When George Bernard Shaw said, “those who can, do, and those who cannot,
teach,” he was offering an insight, a
grain of illumination. He was not dismissing the entire teaching profession.
The French anarchist Proudhon said
“property is theft.” Most of us probably find this statement absurd, but it
too, lingers.
My hypothesis today is in the same spirit. Think about it. leave comment here
My hypothesis today is in the same spirit. Think about it. leave comment here
3 comments:
I agree that meritocracy does not function well in universities or the government, or even General Motors, but it makes some difference in the middle class employment in non-union businesses.
I agree that exorbitant CEO pay is largely unmerited. Senior executive pay in Wall Street firms and large corporations is often taken as surplus profit before taxes are paid. They consider that as being more of a benefit to the company than paying taxes. And, you have to blame our tax code for a lot of that mischief.
If you do a job that thousands of people can do, you are basically kept to minimum wage or a bit above. If you make yourself seem indispensable to you employer and have the courage to ask for a raise, you will often get it.
it's a matter of intrisic value versus market values; some go for the first, some for the second. so if you are in a position to choose, you may go for a mixed bag,both a reassinable income and intrinsic job satisfaction? If you can double your income and half your satisfaction, you may refuse that deal.
but of course these considerations are from an individual perspective, while Tom takes a macro distributions one.
anyway, the world is not organized on a basis of justice, but rather on power, market, political, and/or violence.
I thank Gordon and Paul for their perceptive comments.
Paul’s words are especially illuminating: I have asked many times on this blog (rhetorically) whether there is NO OTHER way to talk about “value,” than the market way. And I have argued over and over again that there must be. But the knuckleheads always retort that the ONLY thing which determines value is supply and demand. Not so.
It is so nice to be reminded of the distinction between INTRINSIC value and MARKET value.
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