--Lael Ewy
Another way of
thinking about money is as an expression of what we find valuable. We
invest, in the form of wages and spending, in those things we care
about, and we ignore or divest from those we don't.
In this respect,
certain parts of our economy, such as energy, real-estate,
technology, and money itself (in the form of finance), would seem to
track fairly well with our expressed values. These industries are
generally fairly robust and salaries within them fairly high.
But for a nation
that claims to be all about “family values,” we fall very short,
if measured in how we spend. While public schools are large parts of
most state budgets, they pale in comparison to what we collectively
spend on entertainment, and compared to entertainers, teachers are
poorly paid. The elderly and preschool-age children are taken care of
by some of the lowest-paid workers there are, when that work is paid.
For the most part, it isn't, being taken on by parents or
grandparents, as even the relatively low wages of childcare are still
too high for most of us to pay out of pocket.
We're happy to pay
entertainers exorbitant salaries for mediocre work, yet we expect
artists who have spent years perfecting their craft to work for free.
Except for the few
of us who can afford to keep domestic workers—many of whom are
undocumented and paid under the table anyway—most work that goes
into maintaining a household goes unpaid.
Jobs tied to
maintaining history and culture are also below industry standard or
volunteer, as is almost all work involving the very poor. These
sectors are dominated by non-profit NGOs, often chosen to supplant
what was once done by well-compensated government employees as local
and state governments have shifted ideologically Right.
So for a nation
that, at every campaign stop, is touted as being “great,” and as
a nation that gets collectively teary when we talk about the
importance of family and our national heritage, we do a terrible job
of actually compensating the people who keep us culturally afloat and
domestically stable. The work of the tens of millions of Americans
whose time and energy is invested in creating culture and maintaining
families is, in a very literal sense, considered worthless.
This isn't merely an
issue of putting our money where our mouths are; this is the way the
market, rather than being some natural force, is actually a
truth-teller, revealing our real values—and those values are
rotten. If we merely follow the money, we can easily see that we
value management culture over labor, for example, because the power
structure that helps set wages is created by that power structure
itself, and it's never going to invert its relative value by paying
itself less than those who actually get things done.
We value work
outside the home more than we value work inside the home because the
people who decide where the money goes work outside the home. We
value entertainment over education, sensation over art, because the
former are welcome distractions that meet an immediate need, and the
latter require reflection and thought, our energy and our active
participation. We value entertainment over art because the former
reinforces the power structures and the latter is a threat. And so
the decision-makers invest in bread and circuses instead of
philosophical symposia, give the latest summer blockbuster a
fifty-million dollar marketing budget and the public library's summer
reading series a shoestring.
The notion that the
market is, in these cases, merely giving people what they want
ignores the role that the existing power structure plays in deciding
what's even available to be had. Try buying a simple, double-sided
razor blade, for example. You'll find a gajillion different
high-dollar multi-bladed disposables, but that simple, double-sided
blade has now become a “specialty item,” even though it costs a
fraction of a penny to make and uses many fewer resources. And
advertising is, after all, not merely informational; it's social
engineering on a grand scale, and we've long ago stopped even asking
questions about how it forms our idea of “what people want.” Try
asking a class full of literature students what local plays they've
seen, for example, and listen to the crickets chirp. Now try asking
the same class about the latest Star Wars movie.
The same phenomenon
explains why celebrity chefs make millions and the local soup kitchen
is staffed entirely by volunteers.
The “we're just
giving people what they want” line also ignores the trillions of
dollars the ΓΌber-rich
keep for themselves and the implicit messages their spending
decisions give to everybody else: a big house for an individual is
more important than modest houses for the homeless; owning a huge SUV
you can barely park or a flashy self-driving electric car is better
than having decent public transportation; boutique private space
flights are more important than a living wage.
Rather than being
slaves to the whims of ordinary folks, the market is an expression of
how power plays out within a society, an expression that creates its
own set of standing waves, pushing the social order hither and yon.
You may or may not be staying afloat, but unless we little folk start
paddling hard in a very different and more just direction, we're all
just along for the ride.
