VALUE

Let’s look at three ways in which we’re misunderstanding value:

Work Wealth Societal Health

Work

For one thing, work creates value, but today we generally only equate “work” with jobs or sales (i.e. the labor market or the consumer market). In this worldview, work is comprised of whatever tasks either an employer or a customer is willing to pay for. There are many types of work, however, that receive no remuneration from these markets and yet represent an enormous value to society: taking care of sick parents; reading to your kids; pursuing art, school, or a business; volunteering; exercising; hell, even maintaining your general hygiene.

Not all work equals jobs, but all work has value.

Speaking of jobs, they don’t magically spring forth from these beings we call job creators. They are a response to a demand. Employers certainly fulfill a crucial role in the process, and they deserve real credit, but mostly for having the foresight and courage to recognize that demand and fill it. For example, my partner Deia and I are the creators of a documentary series that, all told, will employ around 15–20 people for about a year and a half on the average. I also raised the money and hired a team of web developers and an economist to create a tool called the UBIcalculator. Sounds like we could maybe call ourselves job creators, right?

They’re out there, if only we can find them. (photographer —

Supushpitha Atapattu)

But we didn’t “create” those jobs, if we’re being honest. We found them. We listened and we studied and we saw the space in the market for them. We believed in their value, and we took on the risk necessary to allow them to happen. In the end, though, we are not really even creating these projects. We’re just guiding their creation, and we’ve had a lot of help. Beyond the work of our talented hires, we are indebted to the interstates we drove on and the flights we took to find our subjects around the country, to the cameras we filmed with and the millions of man hours of research and technology that went into them, to the copyright laws that grant us exclusive rights to an idea’s capitalization and control while we develop it, to the very existence of the internet, to the funders and donors large and small who supported us, to a million little favors and connections and lucky circumstances, and much more. If we become fortunate enough to generate a significant financial return from any project, we should absolutely be ready to share it with our collaborators, which includes the generations of taxpayers before us who built the system and made it all possible. It includes all Americans. We’re proud of what we’ve achieved, but we’d never call ourselves self-made documentarians. Why then do we always hear about this mythical creature, the self-made billionaire?

Another facet of work that we’ve miscalculated is merit, and we’ve done so by tying our idea of merit almost entirely to dollars. Our national mythology presents the United States as a meritocracy, but do you with your massive wealth and income truly believe that you’re thousands of times more capable and valuable than almost anyone else?

Can anyone really “earn” more in a few hours than one of these laborers earns in a year of full time toil?

Are your daily efforts a thousand times more valuable than mine, or is a very real part of the equation that you’ve got a lot more capital backing you up? Are you really more “productive” while sleeping than, say, a laborer in Idaho working 80 hour weeks? According to your incomes, it would seem so. In fact, when someone without capital is not selling their time to someone else, but instead is working to build their own projects and pursuits, they often have zero income. So, multiplicatively speaking, you’re deemed infinitely more valuable than the student, the mother, or the fledgling entrepreneur, because they are currently deemed valueless by the measure of money.

If you came from poverty and built yourself up, do you remember the day when you could effectively start “thinking rich,” the day when concerns about how you’d feed yourself and pay your rent faded away and you could focus all your attention on your business or your passion? When was the day you knew that you were ok?

I remember the day I had my first glimpse of that moment as well as any single other moment in my life, probably as much as my wedding day. It was the day we finally secured a large funder and I knew that our documentary project would succeed, that we had escaped disastrous personal consequence with our ambitious and idealistic risks, that we’d probably never have to move in with family because of it and that I could do what I know needs to be done and spend the amount to do it that is wisest. I still happened to be in debt at the time, and remained so for quite a while, but from that point on I felt more able to “think rich.” We were finally approved, trusted, and verified. Before that day, we lived with the constant fear that we just might be ruining our lives for what we believed in, because maybe nobody with the power to make it happen would ever believe in us enough to allow it to happen.

I often think about how much better, faster, with how much more focus, and with how much less unnecessary stress we could have put our projects together if we weren’t also cobbling together side gigs to survive, from bartending to random edit jobs, seriously sapping our time, energy, and productive bandwidth. I think about how incredibly fortunate we were to have access to a decent amount of credit and parents who more than once could give us some temporary support to keep the lights on.

I also think about the years I lost between discovering what I wanted to pursue and being able to actually pursue it, a decade of my life at my most inspired and energetic, gone, poured out by the pint with every beer I served behind the bar, waiting for my chance to give what I knew I could.

I think about how many millions of worthy ideas and talents must be out there, unpursued for the paralyzing fear of financial insecurity and the lack of access to support. I think about how many Nikola Teslas, Oprah Winfreys, JK Rowlings, Bruno Mars, and Bill Gates are stocking shelves or flipping burgers full time, waiting until they can just catch up enough to invest their time into their ideas and abilities, but watching that light at the end of the tunnel slowly recede into the distance. I mourn the immeasurable cost to society.

Wealth

Another form of value that we often misunderstand is our wealth, and specifically its impact on the world. Much like we each leave a carbon footprint based on our consumption, we also each leave a socioeconomic footprint based on how our use of money affects the economy and the people in it. Now don’t get me wrong, I highly admire those of great vision and talent who can successfully lead a business or other pursuit, but in terms of net impact for the ultra-wealthy, things become more complicated. If you’re extracting $10M per year in interest and capital gains and donating $100,000 back to great causes, it can be very difficult to take a hard look and realize that, despite those great causes, you might very well balance out in the negative. Much like an oil giant can’t make up for decades of dumping CO2 into the air by planting a few million trees, a 10-figure foundation that spends 5% of its capital annually on saving lives might do far better for the world, by the numbers, by simply not having extracted all that capital in the first place. I know this is going to make some wealthy people angry, but I’m saying that you might be hurting us, despite your efforts to the contrary.

Every one of us wants to heft our own weight, but if you have extreme wealth in this system as we’ve designed it, you’re too heavy to stand on your own feet, because while each dollar is light and nimble, the combined inertia of many millions or billions of them is such that everything else you do becomes inconsequential by comparison to the extractive force that such wealth represents. It’s impossible for any individual to carry that burden, and so it falls upon the rest of us to carry it for you. If I were rich, I’d be heavy too.

Another burden of great wealth is that of false worship. The constant barrage of positive reinforcement from society makes it impossible to maintain an entirely grounded worldview. It works unceasingly to rob you of both humility and perspective. You become forcibly elevated.

Them gods sure can party. (source)

Even criticism often elevates you. Whether people blindly worship you or rabidly vilify you, the tacit implication is that your wealth has made you something other than human. People see you as deities, whether all-knowing and benevolent or capricious and tyrannical. And so you’ve got to fight tooth and nail to hold onto your understanding of your own worth as a human being among human beings.

You may be wonderful and talented, but you can’t be an expert on everything, especially compared to those fighting on the front lines who may be coming to you for support. You must continue to remind yourself that you lack perspective simply due to your position in the world and the circles you inhabit. You don’t have all the answers, and neither, for that matter, do McKinsey analysts or other such high-powered consulting firms, especially when it comes to solving problems in poverty and social justice.

If you wish to maximize your impact, you will need to trust in those with direct and lived experience. To be blunt, you need to find ways to provide your support and get out of the way. You must let go of the urge to control. In the end, that kind of humility is the only way we’ll create a system in which you are not alone up on a pedestal, a world in which those with capital aren’t the de facto gatekeepers of all progress and decision-making, receiving both the acclaim and blame for where society stands at any given moment.

Societal Health

Ok, now to get off your case and back to society at large. Another crucial thing we seriously screw up as a society is measuring the success of the economy as a whole. We generally point to the GDP, the stock market, and the unemployment number, but all of these measures are woefully inaccurate or inadequate.

GDP essentially measures total sold productivity, but it doesn’t account for who’s making or selling the products, it doesn’t account for externalities like public health trends or pollution, and it completely ignores any work or value that is done pro bono, as an in-kind exchange, or otherwise outside the labor market. It also doesn’t account for how much of that production is increasingly being done by machines and software, putting human beings out of gainful employment and concentrating more of the returned prosperity into the hands of the owners of those machines.

As for the stock market, 50% of it is owned by 1% of the population, and 84% is owned by the top 10%, so the stock market mostly reflects the outcomes of the shareholder class and doesn’t much matter for most Americans, the majority of whom can’t afford a $500 emergency, let alone a portfolio of stocks, without taking on debt.

The unemployment number is perhaps the most perverse metric of the bunch, a measurement seemingly designed to help administrations look better. It’s true under Trump, but it was also true under Obama and before him back down the line. Notably, the unemployment number doesn’t account for: people who’ve given up looking for work, people whose unemployment benefits have ended, people who went on disability never to return, people who are in prison, or, morbidly, those we’ve lost to overdoses and suicides, all of which are skyrocketing, particularly in middle America. Did you know that the labor force participation rate is at or around its lowest since the 70s? You might wonder: how can we have both record low employment and record low unemployment at the same time? The reason is that at least one of these numbers is, well, bullshit. Perhaps worse in scale than any of these omissions the unemployment number makes, though, is that it doesn’t account for underemployment and low quality employment. A person who used to make $70K/yr with benefits as a 40hr/wk employee might now be cobbling together three gig jobs, working an inconsistent 20hr/wk, making an unreliable $20K/yr with no benefits, unable to feed their kids reliably, but the unemployment number counts them just as employed as before.

With such distorted measurements, we’re peering into a funhouse mirror. And as a nation looking to the future in turbulent times, it becomes incredibly important to see clearly and in context where we stand and where we may be headed.

We are in the midst of transitioning into the digital age, and a couple decades from now our society and economy will look wildly different than what we see today. To expect otherwise is naive. The fact that things have been operating more or less one way for five or ten decades does not alter this fact. We should not make the mistake of leaning on recent performance to predict future outcomes. History repeats itself until it doesn’t, and then we call it a revolution or a catastrophe, which, if we take a longer view of history, is itself quite a cyclically recurring thing. Funny, it often seems to happen right around whenever inequality gets up to around where it is today. But rather than ushering in this next great societal shift with another violent and pitchforky revolution or resource war, wouldn’t it be nice if this time we could engage in a more proactive and peaceful evolution, without the bread lines, class struggles, world wars, and wide open opportunities for new forms of corruption to step in and assume power?