What do we pay people to do, and why?
There are, somewhat loosely, three kinds of jobs. There are those worth doing in themselves; they would be worth doing whether or not they were necessary, and worth doing whether or not one was paid to do them. In this category fall many scholarly or intellectual activities, including science and other pursuits of knowledge, art, writing literature, etc. . There are those with no inherent value, but which are valuable as means to an end, and ought to be done even if nobody was paid to do them. Most skilled and unskilled labor falls into this category: farming, road work, etc. -- but also (arguably) things like entertainment production (it is good to have some produced entertainment -- games, movies, the like -- available, though obviously quality matters here and far more is produced than is really optimal), medicine, and many sorts of engineering. Finally, there are those which are worth doing only if, and only because, one is paid to do them. The production and (especially) sale of useless gadgets, and many facets of advertising (is anyone prepared to maintain that telemarketers or the producers of obnoxious internet pop-up ads are doing something worthwhile or that needs doing?) fall into this category.
It seems to be nearly tautological that it is desirable to have as many people as possible doing the first sort of activity (things good in themselves), and that labor ought to be directed toward the second (instrumental goods) just insofar as is necessary to uphold society and improve the general human condition -- and whenever such an activity can be done with less effort, it ought to be done so, to free up time and energy for enjoyment and for pursuit of activities good in themselves.
Now originally the vast majority -- nearly all -- of human effort was devoted to the second kind of activity. Absent large-scale organization, industry, advanced technology, and automation, it takes much of the general effort of society to feed, clothe, shelter, and defend itself. The people who pursued philosophy (and later science), for instance, were generally those who were lucky enough to be wealthy enough not to have to do ordinary work.
Well, we now have large-scale organization. We have massive industrial capability. We have quite a lot of labor-saving and labor-easing technology, and an increasing amount of automation capable of doing our labor for us. Especially in the West, we have the capacity for an unprecedented amount of our society to simply not need to work on those necessary, but in themselves valueless, tasks that have so long occupied our efforts, and with every advance in technology this becomes more and more true.
What have we done with this capability? Now that we are so much more efficient, do we now have so much more free time to think about things which are valuable in themselves? Are we a society of scholars, devoted to knowledge? Or, at least, do we have more and more free time to associate with one another and develop friendships?
You need only turn on the television, or browse the internet, or walk through a store, or be rudely interrupted at dinner (provided that you are one of those people with enough free time to have a regular dinner with family, of course) by yet another telephone call insisting that you need to refinance your mortgage, to see that this is, of course, not the case. More and more people are doing that third kind of job -- the kind you only do because you are paid to do it. Do not mistake me: I have no ill-will towards those who can get no other job than to sit at a phone bank and call perfect strangers in order to get them to buy something. Those of us lucky enough to have a more meaningful occupation should pity, not despise, them.
But it is a particularly damning commentary on our society that we have used our enormous efficiency and technological capability, not to give ourselves more free time for relationships and contemplation, not to make ourselves a society of scholars in pursuit of knowledge, but instead to create make-work. Such an enormous portion of our vast resources are devoted to the "manufacture of silly luxuries and then of sillier advertisements to persuade us to buy them". What evil have we done, that the fruits of our efforts should not be contemplation or leisure but a suffocating deluge of pointless products and irritating advertisements for them? What evil have those poor folks in the telemarketing call centers done, that we should refuse to pay them except to provide a worthless "service", at best useless and at worst actively harmful to themselves and their fellow human beings? What kind of a society are we, that we should allow and even encourage all of this, valuing sales above knowledge, make-work above rest, and money above everything?
May God have mercy on us all.
5 comments:
I think the three categories you've delimited have nothing to do with what people are paid and why.
If someone's being paid to do it, that means that someone out there believes that it is useful to them. If money is being transferred, the one giving it believes that the one getting it will bring him some value. That's independent of whether it's beneficial to the person doing the job or what its side effects are.
Perhaps in a communist/socialist society it would be different; then you would have the government dictating what jobs they believe are worth doing based on some criteria. But in our current, mostly market-based economy/society, jobs get paid for if and only if somebody else believes it is useful to them.
If a job is worth doing in itself without compensation, then it's not a job, it's a hobby; it would be done anyway even if nobody was paid for it, and it's quite likely that its price would soon drop to zero...
There are plenty of people who read as a hobby and learn things without being paid for it; just like there's plenty of people who play sports without being professional athletes, or who write blogs and stories without any sort of monetary compensation. They become jobs when they cross over to category 2 and somebody else decides that it's useful to them if there was more of that job done and offers compensation.
3 is indeed kind of sad. It seems like it's a consequence of capitalism - it's part of the inefficiencies that come from competition... perhaps. Not too sure. I'd guess you could get at the answer by tracing back the trail of money - who pays them, and why do they believe it benefits them to do so, and trace that back... not sure where you'd get, I'm not a businessman and I don't know what kind of market pressures make telemarketers necessary/helpful.
The examples that you chose to illustrate your job categories show an intellectual bias.
What does it mean for a job/hobby/task to be inherently worthwhile? The answer implied by your examples are that activities that take mental effort to perform or appreciate are inherently more valuable than those that do not, but you do not justify why this is so.
Many would argue that some forms of art are not inherently valuable, and it is hard to draw the line between entertainment (which you declare to not be inherently valuable) and many forms of art.
On the flip side, many would argue that non-mental activities are inherently valuable. Even if we have efficiencies that can take us away from food production, many would argue that there is value in the process of turning seed and soil to food. There is value in the feeling of creating something beautiful and physical with your own hands. (Not to mention that being a successful non-industrial farmer is a highly intellectual pursuit.)
I do not think you can say anything is inherently valuable or inherently not valuable, although there are common trends. At the end of the day, the best an individual can do is ask theirself, "Do I wish I had spent my time some other, or am I happy with the choices I made?" If they can honestly answer that they are happy with how they spent their time, then the pursuit had value.
Max: I don't mean that the first category excludes instrumental value -- you are correct that in our society, if someone is being paid to do something, then either (a) someone else thinks they can make money from the efforts, and/or (b) someone else thinks that it has instrumental value.
I disagree that people would necessarily do the worthwhile things if they weren't paid -- for some of them at least, not many would. Some of them require a great deal of effort to do, and since one does need a paying job to live on, that effort gets spent earning a living. This is, for example, one of the reasons (the other being the difficulty of getting an education) why, for most of history, pursuits like philosophy, science, and mathematics were confined to the leisured class. This is not as true nowadays, mostly because we as a society have decided that such academic disciplines have instrumental value as well, and so are willing to pay for people to do them.
Erika: You are of course right that I excluded from the first category occupations (particularly certain physical activities) I should not have. Mea culpa. Perhaps I should not have given examples at all -- at best they served to confuse the issue.
Maybe now that I am more awake than when I wrote the original I can clarify my position somewhat. As you mention, it is not always obvious, or not always agreed-upon, when a certain activity is valuable in and of itself and when it is merely instrumentally useful. Obviously I can see the value in intellectual endeavors more readily than in others -- that is not to say that it is not present elsewhere.
What was intended to be the thrust here is that there are certain activities which are worth doing absent any instrumental value they may have. The problem, as I see it, is not that we value too much things with instrumental value, but that as a society we seem to value occupations only for their instrumental value. And not even that -- in many cases an occupation is valued, not for its inherent worth, nor its instrumental value, but simply because it works to transfer money to someone.
The goal of any business endeavor, I think, should be to "do well while doing good" -- that is, to earn a living by doing things with inherent or instrumental value to them. What really bothers me is that, increasingly, the goal of many such businesses is quite simply "to make money". Sometimes we get lucky and they make money by providing a needed good or service. Sometimes they don't, and we get more and more jobs of that third type. This is what I have a problem with.
The fact that we can, as a society, afford to pay people to do jobs of the third type means that we have excess resources. The right thing would be to spend those excess resources on things that are worthwhile. (Or perhaps we don't really have excess resources after all... in which case, there is something equally wrong with spending them on this nonsense.) Instead, we seem to think it just fine that people are doing jobs which have no real use or value beyond shifting money from some people's hands into others'. This is what I find unacceptable.
I am aware that there are some jobs which seem valueless but which, due to inefficiencies in the system, are actually instrumentally useful -- some extent of paper-pushing and bureaucracy, some amount of advertising (to make one's product known, for instance). But I refuse to believe that because person A thinks paying person B to do job X will make person A money is a good enough reason for us to think that we should be fine with our resources being spent on X. It may be a good enough reason for B to do X, if B has no better options, like the poor folks in the call center trying to sell you some worthless item or rip-off service during dinner. But why do we tolerate A being such a douche?
I think the general principal is this: the purpose of the whole system -- economics, government -- is to make it possible for people to spend as much time, and in (should they wish it) as much comfort, as possible doing things which are worthwhile. I think a broad understanding of worthwhile is best; perhaps take Erika's last two sentences as a good assessment. Yet we end up with, despite our vaunted efficiency, people spending more and more time doing unambiguously worthless jobs. Isn't this a sign that something has gone terribly wrong?
One more comment. I don't think that this is primarily a problem with the economic system (I suppose I am somewhat leftist about most economic issues, but I don't think that government control of the economy is the answer; for one thing, there are too many potential abuses there also -- governments are spectacularly fallible). It's primarily a problem with the culture: we value money too much and, well, value too little.
I throughly agree with your update. Especially,
"The problem, as I see it, is not that we value too much things with instrumental value, but that as a society we seem to value occupations only for their instrumental value."
I also agree that this is a cultural problem that should not and, I would claim, cannot be directly changed by the government. I do not believe the government can change our values just by handing mandates down from on high, although they certainly have influence. However, there might be value in changing the government policies that indirectly encourage business to hold money over everything else.
For example, the government looks monetary measures such as GNP as indicators of growth. I would much rather see a move to a more diverse measure such as "Gross National Happiness". Despite its flaws, it at least measures more factors (such as health and perceived well being). Measuring multiple factors makes it easier to remember that measures are just proxies for the things that are truly valuable.
Brian,
Your approach assumes that value is a universal measurement. Should a man forfeit what he values because another man decides it is worthless?
-Nate
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