Empowering the Uncontainable

Meritocracy and conspicuous consumption are dirty dancing partners. Value is personal, and price is a blunt tool for exchange. Price is a way to “put a number on anything”, even if it shouldn’t be boxed in that way. 

Demonstrating your wealth via things you can see can be an attempt to put a price on yourself. To show what you are worth. If you buy the idea that people with more merit, have higher prices, and so in a hand-to-mouth world... consume more. Another way of thinking of money and price is a tool to build the capacity to cope with life. Not about ranking or comparison, but rather about endurance and resilience. 

If you snap the need to (always) listen to price, you can internalise the way you look at value. You are not extracting yourself from life, in all its glory, and with all its challenges. You are building capacity which requires support. You can’t do it alone. 

Wealth is built in containers. We need to recognise our communities, and see how the containers we build exist within bigger containers. Trust in the bigger container is part of Adam Smith’s argument in favour of win-win capitalism versus win-lose mercantilism (battleship diplomacy with nations competing). He was able to show that freedom of movement in capital, goods, services, and people is win-win. 

You need to give things shape and form to make money, but those containers can morph and empower the uncontainable.

Changing Shape and Form

Allowing for Extra

How do you start? Building Capital so that you can gradually become less dependent on your earning ability, seems like a game reserved for the wealthy. Advice is tricky because we have different lifeboats in a shared storm. When people talk of being “self-made”, they are often referring to whether, or not, they inherited Capital or a pre-packaged business from Mom or Dad. It is more complicated than that. Most of us have weird relationships with money. Wrapped in our sense of worth. In our relationship with our parents. In their relationship with their parents. In our politics. The advice I give is deeply wound up in my own story. Our self is a bigger container. The bubble we grew up in. Mine is based in Apartheid and Feminism. One based on inequality and gender roles. For me, starting starts with constraint. Having a firm and absolute hold on what “enough” looks like. Then not feeling like more than that is better. I wasn’t trapped in debt, and had the option of choosing a path to develop skills & knowledge to get an income. So my first steps were pragmatism, spending discipline, and delayed gratification. Building a buffer. A few months spending in the bank. Then putting the extra to work. I realise that extra is a foreign concept for most. That is what needs to change.

My Fellow Americans (Stuart)

Guest Post: Stuart Torr

Stuart is the single individual who has had the biggest impact on my world view. We definitely don't agree on everything. Far from it, but I consider that a good thing. He is incredibly well read, and through asking questions and pointing to books, has chipped away at some of the inconsistencies in my thinking. We met at University, which was a great place to give each other rubbish about our bizarre views. We had time to sit, drink tea, eat toast, and make up scenarios or 'thought experiments' to think about how we would react. Stuart now lectures Maths at the University of Cape Town. Follow him on Twitter. 

My Fellow Americans
by Stuart Torr

"My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country"

I don’t actually like this quote, but it does suggest that there are different ways of looking at the morality of different systems of government. One way we can judge a system is by how it treats us. But if we care personally about doing good, we might have different criteria for whether a system is good or not.

One of the problems with capitalism is that so many worthy jobs are relatively poorly paid. Nurses, teachers and social workers just don’t seem to get what they should. This feeling often applies to things like difficult manual labour and maybe poets etc. too.

A lot of these jobs really are worthy of praise, but sometimes, the low pay is a signal that nobody wants whatever it is that you’re selling. The fact that something requires a lot of skill or is difficult or unpleasant isn’t a good reason on its own for it to be well compensated. It might be a sign that you shouldn’t be doing it in the first place. In a complex (rich) economy, deciding if a job or worthy is not always easy and markets are a powerful tool for finding out.

One example of this was the coal miners in England in the 1980s. Coal mining was (still is) an awful job. It was unbelievably demanding physically, dangerous and had terrible long term health consequences. But coal was in demand so people were willing to spend a lot of money paying people to dig it up and the pay was pretty good (relative to other options). In the absence of the demand it would have been insane to set up a coal mine. But this is sort of what miners were trying to do in the 80s. The economy had changed and money from the coal dug up couldn’t pay those salaries anymore. What they were doing was no longer as useful. The job wasn’t less difficult so our intuitions say something like, “Look at how hard these guys work to feed their families, you can’t seriously tell me they haven’t earned the X pounds they’re asking for.”

'Men leaving a UK colliery at the close of a shift' 1914 - Gerald Palmer

But it really *was* less worthy. It does actually matter if what you’re producing is more or less what you’re getting paid. If we care about doing something worthwhile, we should care about this. Using taxpayer’s money to keep them employed in terrible jobs seems like a terrible lose-lose to me.

The miners should have been better taken care of. Just giving them a bunch of money would have made more sense. But if they cared about making a positive impact on society they lost the moral high ground by insisting that uneconomic mines stay open and resisting wage restraint. The difficulty of the job should not be equated with moral worth.

It’s not the end of the story, but if you want to do something worthwhile then earning the market rate for a job that you can be fired from (or you can go out of business without being bailed out) is a really good sign that you’re doing something worthwhile. 

Valuing Things

Happiness depends on how we value things. We have limited time, attention, resources, abilities and energy. We have to make decisions on what to do. Beyond action, part of our happiness depends on how we think about 'our worth'. This is both a reflection on the cumulative value of everything we have done, and the potential value of everything we could do. How we value things is also determined by how the people we care about and the society we live in values things. We don't exist in isolation. The value of anything lies in how it is connected to other things.