We're not necessarily involved in this kind of judgment ourselves, but we recognize the
phenomenon in our society well enough. The more someone earns, the more likely to be
admired by strangers and perceived as interesting and exciting. Respect appears all too often
to be directly awarded, according to earnings. And in a related move, if you don't have much
economic endorsement, it can be hard for your character or views to be taken seriously.
It's not a mystery that this relationship got established. because there are so many
conspicuous cases where we find a genuine link between talent, effort, skill, contribution,
and income. The most impressive examples involves brilliant surgeons, the authors of Matilda
and Harry Potter, or the team behind the development of graphene. All these geniuses had a lot
of talent, they made a lot of money, and their contributions are terrific. They make the
connections between a high income and virtue seem right and natural.
But, turn to the pages of economics textbooks, and a very different, far less emotive account
of wages emerges. Economics states that : wages are determined, not by social contribution,
but by the number of people able and willing to do a given job, that others want done.
If there are a lots of people able to complete the task, you won't need to offer very much
money to get their labor. And if there are very few people able to do the job, you'll
have to pay a lot more. But note that there's no room to judge the worth of the work being
done.
The determinant of wages is just the strength of demand in relation to supply. Taken in
one direction, this explains the high salary of a hit man. A person who can, for the most
exacting and difficult missions, where the target possesses private guards and is protected
by triple glazed security glass, extract an early seven-figure sum $1,500,000. Simply
because almost no one on earth is capable of carrying out such a complex maneuver.
Taken in the other direction, the same theory of wages, explains the salary of the modern
hospice nurse. Charged with accompanying people through their last days, a task as meaningful
as one could imagine, yet whose yearly salary is a tiny fraction of the murderer's stipend.
In neither case do the wages have any connection to the contributions being made. It simply
has to do with how many people are capable of carrying out a task, and how much demand
there is for it.
It so happens that in our society, some really wonderful qualities, like consideration, sympathy,
and hard work, are actually rather widespread, which has a deeply paradoxical consequence.
You can employ someone with astonishing qualities and get away with offering them pretty much
nothing at all.
The whole economic system can seem entirely lacking in justice. And our minds rebel against
the gross violation of the principles of fairness. It's normal if we should then scan the horizon
in the hope of finding some answers that can lessen the pain. In the history of the West,
there have been two huge intellectual attempts to resolve the impression of injustice around
wages.
The first is: Christianity, a doctrine which has insisted that a person's worth is to be
determined in an entirely different sense to the financial. After death, a person's
soul will be weighed by God, and his or her true merits perfectly rewarded for eternity.
Wages can't change here on earth, but the meaning of the wage will in the eyes of Christianity
be altered, and the humiliation of poverty should hence lose some of it's bitter sting.
The other huge attempt to introduce justice was Marxism. Karl Marx's work argued for a
new world in which workers would, for the the first time, be rewarded according to the
worth of their contributions to society. So down would go; the wages of the hit men, casino
owners, and mining tycoons. And up would go the wages of the nurse, and the farmer. Communism
would return justice to incomes.
In their own day, these seemed like very impressive solutions. Yet for different reasons, they're
not in any way things we can now put our hopes on. The current economic order is pretty firmly
established, and is not about to change any time soon. But the hopes remain for some way
of dealing with the disjuncture between wages and contribution.
It may be an odd place to look, but the most immediately usable solution to the situation
may lie in a really unexpected place; the walls of an upper gallery in the Wallace Collection
in London's Manchester Square - home to a small painting called, The Lace Maker, by
a little-known German artist called Casper Netscher, who painted it in 1664. We've caught
the Lace Maker in what looks like a quiet mid-afternoon. She's concentrating on a difficult
task, carefully threading her needle. It would take her around five hours just to make one
square centimeter. Her eye's will tire, she'll make something dazzling and moving, an externalization
of the best sides of her nature. And yet, her reward for the exquisite craftsmanship
will be a few pennies at best. Lace making was a major industry for women in the 17th
and 18th centuries. But as it happens, it was also one of the lowest paid, for a stubborn
unbudgable (immovable) reason we're coming now to understand. Lots of people could do
this work.
Interestingly, many artists were drawn to paint lace makers at their task. The artists
had no hopes of reforming how lace makers got paid, but they had an ambition to change
the lives of lace makers nevertheless. They wanted to use art to alter the status of these
lace makers. By directing viewers to the intelligence and dignity of the craft of lace making, they
hoped to redeem the social standing of this economically slighted class. What the artist
were doing with lace makers reflects a general capacity of art, to redraw what we think as
prestigious and to return proper appreciation for what certain people, especially those
deemed marginal by the dominant social hierarchy, are and do.
Sadly, for all the status we accord it, art is actually a pretty small thing in the world.
But the move that art has made, needs to, and can be redeployed on a much larger scale.
Art is a mechanism for appreciation, which is particularly adept at the close study of
the ways in which an individual might be deserving of tenderness, sympathy and admiration; and
yet neglected by the wider world. The goal of art is to increase the amount of dense
and accurate information about people's jobs, so that we can stop using mere wages as our
measuring rods.
Once we get to know people well, in art or otherwise, the state of their bank balance
invariably declines a little. And what they're really bringing to their tasks, starts to
emerge, along with a fairer way of distributing honor and respect.