I have a cold and I am seriously considering shaving my moustache. It's impossible to blow your nose and not have it end up in bugar-cicles on your face.
I used some of my airline miles the other day to subscribe to the WSJ. I was reading some debate on climate change in one section. (Here and here) By the way, an interesting note about www.wsj.com. If you navigate through their site, some stories are locked. But if you find a story you like and then search for the exact title through google.com (a copy paste job) then you will be linked to the story that is unprotected. It turns out they are try to game readers--letting people coming off google read it for free, but people coming through their site have to pay.
Sprawled out on the floor was another section talking about some terribly lame sounding move Bank of America made to try and eek more out of its crappy investment in the subprime boom.
The back and forth rambling of the debate on climate change was only mildly interesting--both sides throwing up strawman arguments trying to capture the moral high ground. But one hypothetical caught my eye. In response to a critique of valuing the output of a human life in the developed verses the developing world, one guy asked: "Do we really value all human life the same? If so, then we should build all our new hospitals in the developing world."
Nothing gets me going like cynicism in print--particularly cynicism in a conservative paper with the picture of a fat, jowly banker from BoA trying to squeeze blood from their rock of bad loans.
But the real questions I thought was this: what if your salary is an index of how morally reprehensible your job is? Just for a thought experiment, say it's true. Some things start to make sense. Teachers are paid very little because it is pretty easy to defend the profession. Yeah, rising generation..., so important..., vital to our national character..., etc. But when you are at a dinner party, you feel pretty good when you can say you teach little boys and girls how to read Dr. Seuss books or how to do differential equations.
Manual labor--that's low paid because it is so defendable. I moved those rocks because they were in the way and so you owe me some money.
But bankers, they have a crap job these days--money is imaginary, so no real work is ever really done. In fact, it's such a morally repugnant job that it has to be split up into various silos so that it is hard for the people who truly understand what the system is doing to ever do anything about it.
In a sense, we, as a society, are paying those bankers hush money. Those bankers are doing what we want--build me new ipods rather than building poor people a hospital. We pay smart men and women to convince us of the necessity of using resources to create luxuries for ourselves rather than utilities for others.
You have to quiet all those inner voices that try to say that it's a matter of economics or the law of the natural harvest, or whatever it is that you have come to embrace as an excuse to avoid doing more self-less good things. I am not trying to get you to change your point of view, just maybe see the world more cynically for a bit. Maybe we just can't handle the truth.
"Teachers are paid very little because it is easy to defend their position" - interesting take as to why we are not paid as much as bankers.
ReplyDeleteBecause in California anyway, teachers, if they can get a job, are paid pretty well.
After all, we only work part of the year. That's what I like about the job.