Said Daniel Markovits, lawprof and author of "The Meritocracy Trap," quoted in "Hustle culture: Is this the end of rise-and-grind?" (BBC).
Do you/did you work for "meaning and community"? What percentage of the compensation for your work is/was pay/meaning/community? It could be 100/0/0 or 33/33/33 or 50/10/40. You get the idea. Seriously, I would like to know. Do you feel you need to put 100% on pay or risk getting underpaid? Are you some sort of people person who'd put nearly all the percentage points in the third box? And what about me? I've got the middle box — "meaning" — completely overloaded. What's the... meaning of that?
(I know I'm seeing 3 things where Markovits says there are 2. I accepted his categories, but I think meaning and community are clearly 2 different things.)
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At this point in my life (I'm 65), I work almost entirely for meaning and community, since I have enough money to retire. I would say 5 percent money (hey, more doesn't hurt), 45% meaning (my identity is partly tied to being an expert in real estate structured finance), and 50% community (my colleagues depend on me, plus many of them are my friends).
There's a reason "What do you do?" is such a common question when getting to know someone. Because it the quickest way to learn about the person's interests and talents (and financial station, I guess.)
My pay/meaning/community is 70%/20%/10%. I need the pay to support my family, it's an interesting job with some meaning, and I work with a lot of good people. The 70% is a fixed number, everything flows from there.
I did do work for "meaning and community"...at least that's how it started out. My Army career was 10/50/40 when I started and 10/20/70 when it ended. My current career is 80/20/0.
And I disagree 100% with the premise of "The Meritocracy Trap". I've never not been on the winning side when I've sided with my own merit or that of others, and I've only ever seen people without merit lose. YMMV.
AKA "Live to work" versus "work to live."
There's room for variety and different life strategies. Corporations (e.g., Elon Musk) routinely rediscover that 20% of the workers do 80% of the work. Social loafing is the norm, as is follow-the-leader.
When times are tough, the hardcore will either take over or be pushed into leadership roles. When times are easy, the loafing and conforming majority teams up to help themselves and limit competition (e.g., equity efforts; cutting down tall-tree workers who make them look bad).
I work 100 percent for pay because I need money to live the lifestyle I desire for me and my family, but I am willing to work for less than I could otherwise get by preferring to work in a pleasant, less stressful environment with good coworkers and clients. In the same vein, I don't work for meaning, but would avoid jobs that directly violate my moral beliefs. So I will say 100/0/0 with caveats.
Craig
Yeah, I’m sure Victorian coal miners went to work for the deep fulfillment. The pseudo intellectual paper pusher class shouldn’t be allowed to run the world. They are so far removed from reality.
"I've never not been on the winning side when I've sided with my own merit or that of others, and I've only ever seen people without merit lose."
Correction: "I've only ever seen people without merit lose" until I knew who Hunter Biden was.
I apologize for my error.
I would say 45/45/10 - but the community is equally split between community of co-workers (the job is kind of monastic and I don't interact with them all that much) and the community of working parents (I like being one of them).
Community is what I do with my spare time.
"pay/meaning/community" Interesting idea.
When I was a physics teacher, I'd talk to my students about their career aspirations. This would have been a good way to frame it. Every high school senior wants to go for the money, but they really don't mean that.
Toward the end of my teaching career, it was 60/60/60 because I was high on the pay scale, was really good at my job and worked with great people that I knew well.
During the Covid lock-down year, it was 20/20/20 because I was working 80 hrs per week to generate quality video lessons, students were apathetic or cheating their asses off and everyone was isolated.
I know the percentages should add up to 100%, but there is some privilege built into that. Pay is critical until one gets to a point that expenses are met.
Now that I am comfortably retired, my target job would be 10/30/60. If it isn't fun, I'm not coming in.
I think the values change over time. When you are a child and thinking, what will I do when I grow up. I think the second and third numbers are quite high, and which one is higher is likely calibrated to your own self-esteem and narcissism. Lower self-esteem would see a higher sense of meaning in your job. A higher narcissist might think their work will do more for the community.
Once you start working, I think pay surpasses all until you meet the basics of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. That includes some level of meaning and community, but safety and physiological requires adequate compensation to obtain self control. Otherwise, how can you reach self-actualization? During this period, pay was higher to me than meaning and community combined with meaning a bit higher than community.
When I secured the well-being for myself and safety for my family, I began to care more for my community. As I felt more accomplished, meaning dropped even more. My pay now feels unnecessarily high, but that allows for more time to give to community. So pay is still important but less so, meaning low, and community higher. That said, I do for the community because I can, not so much that I feel obligated nor find satisfaction from it. Most often, I find what I do for community to be under appreciated and often misunderstood by the community.
You get play-for-pay jobs if you're a certain kind of STEM guy. Huge blocks of free time on zillion dollar mainframes otherwise idle at night, provided you're willing to come in and turn them on.
"I think meaning and community are clearly 2 different things"
Correct. But meaning and money need not be.
The equity deception and compelling interest for inclusion.
Is work the only way to find 'meaning and community'? I found most of the 'meaning and community' in my life outside the workplace. And the paycheck wasn't a goal out of simple geed. That's how I supported a home, a spouse and children, and the activities that brought 'meaning and community' to my life.
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In twenty-nine years at [LARGE AIRLINE], I was often invited to consider myself a member of the '[LARGE AIRLINE] family.' Usually right before a pay cut or before a lot of people got laid off.
There is an idea that you should find a job where you can get paid to do what you love. I used to think that was a good idea. But the problem is, people don't pay you because you love it, they pay you because it serves their purposes. So, when what you love comes into conflict with their purposes, you don't have a job any more, or you don't love it any more. Been there.
During my 20 years in the Air Force, it was 45% meaning, 45% community, 10% pay.
While at Northwest Airlines and FedEx, it was 70% meaning, nearly 0% community (it is typical to rarely fly with the same pilot even twice in the same year) and 30% pay.
In both the military and NWA/FedEx the level of professionalism and commitment was very gratifying.
I had a several year period furloughed after 9/11. At first, I was slinging satellite dishes at the sides of houses in the midst of a Michigan winter. Hard to say what any of the percentages were. I enjoyed the work, mostly. Doing the jobs properly required some degree of skill. But meaning? Zero community. At $18/hour, it seems odd to say it was $100% about the pay, as little as that was.
But the kids wouldn't stop eating.
Later, I did data base design at Ford. 30%, 30%, 40%.
All in all, though, I spent nearly my entire working life enjoying what I did. Pretty lucky.
"Meritocracy trap". Sheesh.
You know what you get when merit no longer matters? Failure of everything.
For most of my life, my identity was tied up in what I did for a living as a litigator with my specializations. Because my efficacy was so intertwined with the performance of my team, the job's challenges and rewards were tied to the satisfaction of the small group of people working with me toward the common goal. Pay was important, but relationships mattered enough that I would take less compensation to hold the team together and make sure others were feeling good about their career choices.
I found that team cohesion and satisfaction were tied to physical proximity. Once COVID turned us into portable text strings across multiple time zones, the sense of team became attenuated. People became more fungible, and the rewards increasingly centered upon dollars, standing alone.
I'm old enough to remember when work was considered essential for survival. Religion was where you went for community and meaning.
Work provides meaning for life, but somehow I think that when he talks about "meaning and community" I think he may actually mean "status display" and "virtue signaling."
If you're only making $40K working for an arts nonprofit, you still need some reason to believe you're inherently superior to the base plumber making $120K...
Merit was created by the White Patriarchy to oppress women and people of color.
Oh how the world loved Shoemaker Levy 9 doing its thing flying around the solar system until Juniper took it out. Then no one cared.
40/40/20 here, I think.
I knew at an early age that none of my interests were likely to lead to a lucrative earnings career, and if I didn't know it I was reminded often enough by my elders, who with some exceptions (oddly, the ones who both shared some of my interests AND ended up with the most money) couldn't understand studying anything for any reason but money.
Luckily, the job I ended up with offered me a lot of flexibility in some areas-- a case of so few having any idea what I was supposed to be doing that I could largely choose my own tasks from a huge and diverse array of legitimate activities.
Like others, I have continued to serve my community after retiring, and not just by commenting here, either.
"find something you love doing so much that you would pay to do it. Thrn get so good that people will pay you for doing it"
I heard this years ago on a Zig Ziglar tape. (I give that man a lot of credit for my success)
My recollection is that he credited Gadabout Gaddis who parlayed his love of fishing into a successful TV show and career in the 50s.
I started changeover.com in 1990 thinking it was going to be a good niche to make a living in. It is. It turned out to be so much fun that I would almost pay to do it. But I do need to eat so reluctantly charge my clients.
John Henry
Years ago, I coined the term 'psychic income' to describe the forms of non-cash compensation from employment. Cash income is necessary to pay the bills and provide for a secure retirement. But, once the bills are paid, and you're feeling fairly secure, psychic income increasingly becomes the focus. At least, that seems to be the case for most people I've worked with over the years. Most people want to feel 'good' about what they do for a living. That's not a luxury you can afford if you're starving.
You should get paid for the work if it is offering you nothing new to learn or you could work for less if the job offers you the opportunity to learn something.
One of the most important lessons I learned was to separate my self worth, community, etc. from my job. They can and will take you job destroying you as you age by taking your ability to earn a living, your meaning and your community.
One of the problems with apprenticeship in the US, at least that overseen by unions and the DOL, is that they demand higher wages for the apprentice than would be paid someone who just did the entry level job which is backwards from the real exchange.
Viewed in a commercial sense, as an exchange of consideration or values, apprenticeship can be regarded like other engagements; yet, what an apprentice gives as well as what he receives are alike too conditional and indefinite to be estimated by ordinary standards. An apprentice exchanges unskilled or inferior labour for technical knowledge, or for the privilege and means of acquiring such knowledge. The master is presumed to impart a kind of special knowledge, collected by him at great expense and pains, in return for the gain derived from the unskilled labour of the learner.
—The Economy of Workshop Manipulation (1876), J. Richards
50/40/10
If I were offered a job without the same meaning/community, the salary would need to be roughly double in order for me to be tempted. So approximately 50% of my "compensation" is in the strong meaning/community that my job provides.
You work for your needs, food, clothing, shelter. Thats it. Once you exceed those, you work for free time. Its anthropological. The earliest hunters/gathers discovered once those were met, they did some thins better than others. The best hunter discovered he could trade dressed animals for nuts and berrys...from the best at gathering those. The both discovered when the concentrated on what they did well, and traded with others that had skills better than he, they both ended up with free time. Thus started specialization.
Today you work for free time, for meaning (hunting, cooking, learning, creating, gardening, etc.
You work for free time...community. Volunteer, clubs, church committees, mentoring, boards etc.
Me? I delayed gratification and saved my free time for my later years. Overtime,pension, savings, so I could retire when I felt like it. Spent ten years looking for my part time jobs that would provide the meaning and community I need and desire. Once I found my part time job, I offered by boss a deal I would take a raise, no more working weekends and 14 hour days, or I retire. So I retired. Contract employment allows me to set my own hours and take a long weekend or a whole week, with little to no notice. I will work this way until I'm in my 70's, or my knees give out.
40/40/20
Pay and meaning equally important, community mostly outside of work.
There used to be an organ grinder with a monkey on Fisherman's Wharf in Monterey California. His line was "Money makes the monkey dance.". When you have good, competent co-workers being at work can be a pleasure, but it's not necessary in order to make a living.
I would do my job for free. I'd want flexible hours, but what boss would have a problem with that deal? By my job, I mean the blue collar part, not the office work. The blue collar stuff is machining, programming machines, running machines, welding, lifting, solving mechanical problems. In fact, I don't think I'd live long if I stopped. When I go on vacation, I'm done with relaxing after the first day, then I need to fix something. I consider myself blessed. I've had jobs I've hated, but only because they were too boring, never because they were hard. Besides, I really don't need much money, and I make plenty off of investments, but if I was single, I'd sell my house and live as a homeless traveler, sleeping in hotels and in my vehicle, stopping at places where I could be useful to people doing it for free. I don't need anything but what can fit in my pickup truck.
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