There’s this discourse, which picked up a bunch during the COVID years, about how the most essential workers in our society earn the least, and people then debate the value of the CEO or the elite white collar tech worker.
I’ve never been an EMT or a grocery store clerk, but there are a decent number of other things that I’ve been, in some splits that are maybe not common. For example, I’ve been both an author and a professor, each for a number of years. I had to stop doing both of these things because, with very few exceptions, it’s simply not possible to earn a living doing them. They don’t pay a living wage. In some cases, they don’t pay even half a living wage.
The advances for my books were each on the order of $1,500 to $3,000 for trade nonfiction, and with the total sales life of a trade nonfiction book being a year or two and the total sales if you’re lucky being numbered in the tens of thousands if you really do well, all you had to do is write 50 books a year to make a living.
Similar story in academic life. You’re expected, as a matter of course, to publish. A lot. One paper can be as difficult as, if not more difficult than, writing an entire nonfiction trade book. And yet in academics, the pay for publishing is… zero. Zilch. Nada. You get the dollars for the classroom side of things. Which, for the only tenure track offer I ever got, was $30,000 per year for a 5/5 (basically, you spend your entire waking life either in the classroom or awake at home at 3:00 am grading homework), with the chance to earn as much as $48-$50 if I made tenure in a decade by somehow publishing a ton.
I stopped doing these things because there is literally no way to make a living doing them for most people. They’re pastimes for the already wealthy.
And yet, they are objectively and subjectively the most consequential things I’ve ever done, or will ever do. I still hear from students who say I changed the trajectory of their lives, and that my classes were the most informative that they ever took. And I still hear from people who have read my books. Some of them are the only book on a given subject, and are in the Claude Anthropic settlement (i.e. what the AI knows about that topic… it learned from me).
The things that I’ve done since then have no lasting importance. My first book was in 1997 and is still of import today. Meanwhile, the stuff I do now is generally obsolete and discarded within 3-6 months at most, and only a handful of people will ever see it, and it holds no particular importance for humanity. Yet it pays multiples of anything I could ever have earned writing or teaching.
There’s a sort of econ 101 logic or boilerplate analysis about this that says that people like fulfilling work, ergo there’s a surplus of labor for it, and thus it pays nothing. No, it’s not about demand alone because in fact there has been captive demand, say, in higher education, with infinite government subsidy, for a good long time. But all of those dollars went to administrators and executives of various kinds, and basically none of it went to the instructors.
Similarly, the Claude Anthropic settlement lists 500,000 works (seven of mine among them) that were used to train the AI. The estimated market value of Anthropic at the moment is around $380 billion. If get get really conservative and say that these 500,000 books are only 5% of its value (which I think is a ridiculously small number, given the fact that people expect AIs to give authoritative answers), and that the training and knowlege are only 25% of the value of the AI (also ridiculously low, but just for effect), then that’s just short of $10,000 of value per work, or $70,000 in value for my works. And of course Gemini and OpenAI were both trained in similar corpuses and are worth significantly more, so if we just lowball it and say they have the same value, that’s like $200k in value.
So it’s not that academic work or writing work isn’t in demand. Just like it’s not as though EMTs or grocery store clerks aren’t in demand. I know, this is kindergarten stuff. Back to supply again. People are just willing to do it for less.
The thing that dime store econ can’t really tackle is the philosophical problem here, something that seems a defect in our society. We leave this things that really matter, and that are very in demand, to just be compensated on a supply/demand curve, so that people really can’t make much of a living doing them (or in the case of academic work, or authorship, or teaching grade school for that matter), can’t make a living doing them at all. So what you get is high turnover and uneven quality.
I guess the thing I’m getting at is that there is a gap in the demand world, and it matches the enshittification of everything else. See, the demand isn’t for books, it’s for accurate, useful books. It’s not for academics, it’s for inspiring, mentoring academics who are legitimate experts. The demand isn’t for kindergarten teachers, it’s for good kindergarten teachers. This is the part that the econ books tend to gloss over, because it’s inconvenient.
The public doesn’t hire all of these functions. Book buyers don’t get to hire book writers, and parents don’t get to hire teachers. And this is where the moral problem comes. Because over and over again, the public is frustrated. Why are the experts wrong? Why does my grade school suck shit?
It’s because you didn’t get what you bargained for, what the demand was for, what you paid taxes for or bought the book for. Instead, you got the bad teacher, or the bad expert. Why? Because we won’t pay more. Why? Because someone, somewhere in the chain, and usually really the entire top half of it, is getting nice budget numbers for their PowerPoint decks by saying “we only need to pay X” and eliding the fact that what they’re doing when they pay X is, basically, scamming the public by taking their money and delivering a fake.
Of course I can hear the public school people freaking out now saying it’s a funding problem, but relax, the “up the chain” people here are the district level admins and union folk and of course the senators and congresspeople who once again are in it for themselves and won’t do the hard work of telling the public the truth.
At some level, the reason our economy is broken, and the reason our teachers suck, and the reason the experts are so wrong, is that we’ve had a moral collapse in our civilization. There’s no more Wilford Brimley voice coming out of people saying “I’m sorry, I’m not going to do that, it wouldn’t be right.” Everyone is willing to compromise to pad their own stats. Everyone is out for themselves. Nobody will pay more to do it the right way.
I can hear all the capitalism free market people here wading in trying to figure out if I’m just a Keynesian or if I’m a full on commie but the thing is, I’m old. I was alive in the ’70s and ’80s. And literally, literally you would hear people who could cut corners on a deal, or advertise and sell an inferior product, say things like “well, I know I could make a lot more money that way, but it just wouldn’t be right.” Or “I could claim to be the best in my yellow pages listing, but that would be dishonest, there are better than me in this city, but I don’t charge quite as much.”
That energy is gone. And that’s the point at which capitalism and free enterprise lose the public.
I don’t know, this is a nonsense rant from a non-economist that will no doubt cause a bunch of people to call me an idiot. But it’s not really about economics. It’s really me saying that once upon a time, people didn’t seize their full advantage because it “wouldn’t be right” and people cared a lot about “doing the right thing” and just as importantly, they knew that the “right thing” was not always the “most profitable” thing. This was lost, I think starting with Regan, to market ideology that says that whatever the market does is inherently right, because Adam Smith is god.
That puts capitalism really on the same footing as communism; the world of men ceases to be a space of moral agency and responsibility and is instead just a place where you throw up your hands and say “I don’t have any choice in the matter, it’s all laws of history!”
I’m here to call bullshit on that. And really what this post is all about is just me reflecting on how stupid it is that the most important things I’ve ever done, that contributed the most to society, were the least well compensated, and as a result society lost my labor (and the labor of many others) doing them. Which is dumb. And no, don’t do the thing I just criticized and say “well if you were all that the market would have rewarded you.” Because YouTube is fucking full of worthless streamers who would improve society by dying, yet who are making absolute bank. The market has no morality.
Humans have that.
Well… had that.