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In it For the Money, But With Questions, Too
I would like to use this opportunity to explain why, precisely, I write: for the money. And indeed, as Dr. Johnson said, “No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money.”
Admittedly, the money’s not great, but that is indeed why I do it. (Were it to do over, I might have thought of applying the same talents to corporate law. I fantasize about that fork in the road, sometimes. But I didn’t. No point in regret.) Now, when I say “I do it for the money,” oddly, people think I’m kidding. Or worse: they’re shocked. Even people who should not be. This suggests to me a taboo that really ought not exist. In fact, it’s one I’d like to stamp on, hard, forever.
It should surprise no one that I do what I do all day for the money. In fact, it is what you really hope I’m doing. Earning money. The other options are “stealing it” or “asking you for a handout.” As for the latter, that probably means you–personally. In one way or another. So, unless you feel like being the next person I touch up for a loan, you should hope I’m working as hard as I know how to earn money. Otherwise, you’re telling me you want higher taxes. (You really don’t want me applying for a government grant although; let me tell you, that is one fast and easy way for someone like me to get money.)
Now, the taboo against “being in it for the money” is probably related to another quality that should be a taboo: greed. Definitely bad. Here I’d usually say, “And a private matter, so none of your business,” but because my point here is a bit different, and not actually all about me, I’ll add a private detail. Like most people, I need money to survive, and if at all possible, to help the people I love should they ever need a handout.
That’s usually why people want to earn money. The people who do it to buy their 639th yacht with a helipad, private entertainment system, infinity pool, and solid-gold toilet seats are pretty rare. Less than one percent, I’ve heard. But rare as that is, if things are working right, they’re still paying taxes and making lots of charitable contributions, if only to maintain their image as “not greedy.” (Hence, the taboo against “greed” at the very least has tremendous utility.)
Still, greed is, in my view, not good. So I’d say, “Skip yacht number 639, and donate that money to a much more worthy cause.” That would be my moral advice. Beyond that, none of my business, really. And of course, if things are working right, they earned that money by providing a good or a service that improved someone else’s life, perhaps on a very large scale. Or inherited it from someone who did, and who has the same feelings about providing for their kids’ security as any normal human does.
So, “doing it for the money” should be anything but a taboo, and no one should be even remotely scandalized or surprised by the answer. (Yet they are. Repeatedly. As if they expected me to say, “I do it because I genuinely believe my talents are so impressive that one day Boswell will write my biography, and thus I must leave this legacy to all posterity.” Or as if they expected me to say, “I do it because I am so passionately committed to free markets that I’d forget what they’re about.”)
As it happens, there are many things I won’t write for any amount of money. (Yes, I’ve been offered. The answer has been, “No, thank you.”) Money isn’t the only thing that guides my decisions. It is, however, what guides most peoples’ decisions, most of the time, as well it should be. When things are working right, “making money” is directly connected to “supporting yourself,” “not taking someone else’s money,” “supporting your family,” and “providing people with goods and services they want.”
So let’s clear up that mystery: I am paid to be here. I am grateful to have an opportunity to work hard, earn some money, and do so in a way that’s fun and consistent with what I believe.
As for those paying to be here: I am here to serve you. You are the customer, and you, in fact, are my boss. So you’d better believe I’m listening very closely when you tell me what you want. Studying it at if my life depends on it. Because it does. I, for one, have entirely selfish motives for caring about whether our customers are happy. You can put a lot of faith in my greed and selfishness. That — plus a bit of good contract law, solid institutions, and defending the realm — is how it’s supposed to work.
But for now, let’s now make this thread more interesting. I believe in free markets. But also believe in places where they fail. The most interesting conversations people “on the right” can have, I suspect, are ones in which there is a real debate about these.
This thread is now open for your nomination of the single most non-Pareto-optimal situation in America today — or any other country that interests you — and your argument for this being the case.
Me? I nominate the media. As a member of it. I have no idea how to solve this problem in a way consistent with the principles of “freedom of expression” and “no, we will not have a state-run media, thank you very much.”
Your candidates?
Published in General
How do the animals do it? Bit-coin? :-)
How many animals write as well as Claire?
No, Pareto Optimal is what you want, but I shouldn’t have used the term. My apologies, too confusing. See my comment above. One way to make things better, Pareto-wise, is by freeing the market more. But my point was that this may not result in an optimal outcomes overall. I believe in free markets, but think there are important exceptions.
And I bet these exceptions overlap in an interesting way with the subjects about which we get into the deepest arguments here–politely, of course.
I would disagree about market failure in the media. The media is actually a very robust free market (at least in the US, all those semi-state television and radio monopolies in the rest of the world do make me cringe, even if the BBC has produced some of the best television programs in existence). Only in a free market can a single radio personality — Rush Limbaugh — save a obsolete communication technology — AM radio. All the whining about bias in print media forgets the fact that print is a dying technology, being replaced by electronic media.
There is no need to bring HuffPo in on this, is there?
Indeed. But is that always bad?
I wouldn’t have had any kind of education without public school. Fact.
So how can I argue with a straight face that I’m against public schools–of the kind I went to?
And at the same time. Our public schools no longer seem as good.
So what’s up here? Where, exactly, is this going wrong?
Who’s whining about that? I can’t remember the last time I wrote for or read a print media publication. That’s dead and gone, has been for so long it’s not even part of the discussion, is it?
The only difference between buying an extra yacht because it employs people and the WPA employing people to dig holes on Monday and fill them in on Tuesday is who decided how to waste the money.
Giving money to Salvation Army so they can help Haitians recover from a devastating earthquake is morally better. Arguably, in the long run, economically and politically better as well.
They do. I don’t disagree.
If he spends that money on giving someone like me (or much, much more talented than me) the education I got–for free, thanks to the US taxpayer–I think it’s even better spent. Or, as my stepfather did, spending it on my graduate school education, directly. What he spent would have bought at least a very nice car. He may have wasted it. But I’m sure it wouldn’t have been wasted on many people who simply do not have the money.
See what I mean?
I do indeed think people who make cars are working. Like I am. I want them to have jobs.
It’s places where we have no idea how to fund things–like good education for people who deserve it–where I’m just not convinced there’s a free-market solution.
Open to persuasion.
Claire,
Please define “media” for us. I thought it was about the print media, too. Is there a happy medium anymore?
Any business that does not meet the needs of the customers fails. Education is shielded because people pay indirectly through taxes and it is compulsory for the early grades. The other interesting fact is because jobs were so limited for women, the best women went into teaching and nursing.
Don’t you know? Money is bad. People should only work for fulfillment and to serve their fellow man. That is why community organizing and public service (government work) are noble causes and careers. The more money you make the more evil you are and the less what you accomplish means. That is why government needs to take money from the rich and do what it can to keep people from becoming successful. Its to keep them from becoming evil.
This is a counter-factual. You have no idea what might have come into existence if the government had not monopolized education by offering it for free.
Nobody can compete with free. These kinds of government actions destroy private initiatives.
Sorry, but this is nonsense.
Yacht-building is skilled and often artistic work. People create beautiful things. And the yacht can legitimately be used for all kinds of beautiful things – weddings, parties, etc.
This is not remotely comparable to digging holes and filling them in.
Except, of course, that disaster relief is invariably a disaster. Aid rots on the dock, barred by bureaucrats. Local businesses, who cannot compete with free, go out of business. Local bosses get rich off the inflows of charity, reducing freedom and growing the tyranny.
Doing business with Haiti can help them recover. Giving them stuff? Take a look at what has happened to that country!
In this way, TV commercials are analogous to Republican politicians.
For decades, every consumer hated that commercials were louder than the programs they advertised in. The strategy worked for TV content providers because advertisers insisted on being heard by viewers who were in the midst of raiding the fridge or going to the bathroom (taking advantage of breaks from the content they actually cared about).
The free market aided some participants at the expense of others. Finally, Congress intervened (perhaps regrettably) on behalf of consumers when the market would not.
Why did consumers’ visceral loathing of this strategy not matter to content providers? Because it was an all-or-nothing game. The providers didn’t need happy customers. They just needed customers. They could annoy, ignore, and abuse TV consumers up until the point that customers started cancelling subscriptions. As long as the company remained even slightly better than its competition and preferable to lacking a TV service entirely, the provider continued to profit.
The Republican Party, likewise, doesn’t need to please its customers. It merely needs to seem better than the alternatives — 1) Democrats, or 2) having no participation in elections whatsoever.
That’s why so much attention is payed to swing voters. Why care if a constituent is unsatisfied if he plans on voting for you anyway?
First off, I would quibble with “who deserve it.” That is entitlement thinking.
The free market solution is simple: innovative funding that would, essentially, allow the lender to earn a stake in your future. Lots of companies already do this by funding graduate degrees in STEM, for example.
In Europe, your ancestors and mine earned educations by the largesse of the community who selected who they thought deserved receiving communal funds to be educated. That was entirely non-governmental.
Whenever I tell people that I stopped being an opera singer and became a nurse largely for the money, I get the same appalled looks you described. And then I start feeling like I’m unwittingly part of an Ayn Rand novel.
I might dispute that:
Do you believe, if public education had not been offered, had not been the norm in your community, that your parents would not have taught you
how to read, how to compute, how to think?
that they wouldn’t have directed you toward resources to improve your thinking…just in a different format?
I suspect that because there was opportunity for that to happen for you, by community decision, with good results (by your parents judgement), in a public school, that your parents opted to send you to there.
Do you ever wonder, if your parents were raising you NOW, with the same mindset they had THEN, if they would send you to public school? Or would they have sought other alternatives?
I agree public school is important, but I also concede that in many, many places where it is offered in this country, something is wrong.
Houses are very expensive. Few people can simply buy a house. How do we solve the problem? With a 30 year mortgage.
Education can equally be funded on the come, which would have the added bonus of lenders/future employers incentivizing the kinds of education that actually is considered valuable.
Education is increasingly inexpensive. Between all the free online resources, home schoolers, MOOCs, the internet, etc., knowledge is there for all who seek it and have the discipline to push themselves.
It is child care that is pricey – and what is being paid for with our tax dollars.
OK, let’s say I concede on education.
Other candidates? For places where a free-market solution just ain’t never gonna work?
(I still bet these are the ones we argue about most. Politely.)
Well, if you look at the accounts of the schools in Laura Ingalls Wilders’ Little House books (they were my sister’s, I tell you – I used to read anything, now it’s just almost anything,) the locals would pool resources, build a school (or a community member would allow the use of a spare building) and if the teacher didn’t live in commuting distance of the school, a local family would provide room and board. A bit more organic than today’s school boards, though school boards are an old problem; as Mark Twain famously quipped,
Laura Ingalls Wilder was a good student, and was hired to teach while still in school, (in her novels she apparently exaggerated her teaching certificate level.) As her novels portray, things might be good… or not. Certainly the whole thing gradually came more under government control and regulation (this link is representative, not directly germane to LIW,) with the best of intentions.
With Dewey and his disciples, the purpose of public education changed. With the ascendency of the Frankfurt school and other hard left intellectual streams in the education establishment, public education is no longer what it was when it educated Claire.
A major flaw in economists’ thinking is the assumption of rationality, and the difficulty of modeling irrationality. Surely it is irrational that someone should prefer to write for a living, rather than buy and sell stuff.
As an example of what happens in markets driven purely by the id, when Keith Chen’s capuchin monkeys first grasped the concept of money as a medium of exchange (in a setup that could be described as a welfare state: free housing and food, with a few coins provided for participating in experiments) a few inventions spontaneously arose: stealing money (stealing food was already a monkey thing, but they had to learn to value money to want to steal it) and using money to pay for sex. The newly hatched, ah, professional promptly demonstrated her understanding of money by paying the token she had just received for a grape.
Perhaps there never has been a truly free market, or not for long. The result of a free market will be perceived as unfair by somebody; as primates, our ideas of fairness are probably hard wired. A momentarily truly free market would not last, any more than a pure democracy can last. This is the economic manifestation of the issues that led the Founders to establish the republic with it checks and balances rather than a democracy; the problem is that our government has Progressed to being one of cheques and failures to balance. In the name of fairness, of course.
What we like to think of as free markets are really a very delicate entity dependent on the same virtues as a constitutional republic. Decades of Soviet destruction of civil society and the rule of law resulted in a market that embodied the worst predictions of Communist propaganda – and particularly enriched members of the nomenklatura and their friends.
That’s not fair to animals. I quite like a great many animals.
In that case, every single government employee, contractor, and grant-recipient should have their annual income capped at about US$33,000 per year, which is the approximate cut-off point for joining the global one-percent.
There’s the recently popular saying, something about how if you follow your passion and choose a career that you love, you’ll never work another day in your life. I got fed that nonsense by my father, who is doing what he loves to do. I tried for something I liked to do and utterly failed to find employment (there being a superabundance of tenured history teachers).
So now I help run an electronics manufacturing business – a job I don’t particularly even like, even though I’m one of the owners – because it pays very well.
It’s a false dichotomy. Even an institution that would be politically-impossible to privatize and deregulate completely can still benefit from market-based innovations.
Example: It would be great if the post office could be privatized, like Germany did with its post office, but that’s almost certainly never gonna happen. That doesn’t mean that government-owned post offices cannot be run better (or worse) depending on how much they adhere to market principles.
You may have complaints about the United States Postal Service, but trust me when I tell you that it’s a paragon of innovation and entrepreneurship compared to Canada Post, which seems to go out of its way to make using its services too difficult and expensive to bother with.
It keeps trying to sell its services here too. We ship a lot to Canada, but their fee structure makes it impossible for me to use them (we don’t ship by US Post either for inconvenience reasons). Plus Canada Post’s parcel services share an unfortunate name: Purolator – a brand of oil filter.
I’ve never had a problem having something shipped to Canuckistan via the USPS, whereas I’ve had all sorts of problems getting stuff shipped to me via UPS. That, combined with the USPS’ “one box-one price” gimmick, and I have a lot of time for the USPS.
Trying to ship a package via Canada Post seemingly requires advanced calculus to figure out the rates. It’s one reason Canuckistan has way fewer eBay sellers, per capita, than other countries. Lots of buyers, but few sellers.
Actually, it’s basic economics.
I’m not comparing the skills required. I’m comparing waste. Creating unneeded or unwanted things is not creating value. If I create 100 beautiful chairs and only sit in one then I’ve wasted effort. In the time I spent creating the other 99 chairs I could have created a table or dinner. The same effort has been expended in both instances but the amount of value created is not.
Value created is what we need to be concerned with.
What business can reasonably be done with Haiti?
UPS has brokerage issues and odd delays, plus additional “landed costs” fees and taxes levied on the consignee. Lots of my customers complain about it, and Fedex is little better.
The problems with USPS for us, as a business, are the impossibility of any kind of regular pickup service by their carriers (for all their claims to pick things up, they actually don’t on anything resembling a “rural” route) so we’d have to trundle the boxes down to the nearest post office, and unless you use one of their special boxes, the costs are no better than UPS and without any reliable tracking.