Tag Archives: Money

Money and Human Worth

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‘It’s just business.’

This is one of my least favorite phrases of all time. 
It seems to be used, generally, to explain away unpleasant, unkind, or unethical behavior, or to avoid addressing or dealing with the undesirable side effects of a difficult but necessary decision, in a situation where money is involved.

Yet just because the phrase ‘it’s just business’ might be used only in difficult or unpleasant situations, that doesn’t make it wrong, does it? Couldn’t it be a shorthand way of pointing out that it’s impossible to make everyone happy in every business transaction, since it involves two or more opposing sets of interests? In fact, the phrase could be revealing humane concern, a regret that there are often undesirable side effects to the other in conducting business.

Yes, I allow; the utterer could be expressing these sentiments, choosing this phrase because it’s a ready-made, widely understood part of our lexicon.

But we don’t hear it being used this way much, do we? It seems this phrase is almost always used to justify rudeness, treating human beings as if they’re merely a means to an end or taking advantage of an opportunity to exploit others; to explain away bribery, theft, extortion, bullying, abuse… It’s not generally used in cases of honest dealing, of courtesy and respect for other person(s) involved in a transaction, of doing one’s best to make sure an employee is treated or ‘let go’ in as just and fair a manner as possible. In such situations, no such disclaimer is necessary.

So why am I bringing this up? What’s caused me to think about why and how people use this phrase, and for it to rankle with me enough to write this essay?

Full disclosure: I have a working gal’s chip on my shoulder.

I’ve worked for a living my entire life, since I was about seventeen. Most of those years I worked in customer service. I’ve prepared and served food and drink, I’ve sold goods and services, I’ve made art and things to wear, I’ve lifted and carried loads, I’ve decorated and cleaned, I’ve answered phone calls, I’ve scheduled appointments and events… The list goes on. I consider it all honest work, and I think… no, I know, I’ve helped make life better for many, many people along the way.

All this is true, in fact, of most of the people in the world. Behind every counter and cash register, on the receiving end of every phone call and email, in every kitchen and factory and field and warehouse and office and hospital, other people’s work make our lives better. We depend on them for providing the necessities and the luxuries of life. Their hard work makes our lives enjoyable and even possible. Given this fact, it never fails to disappoint me, and sometimes still surprises me, how often people feel entitled to treat working people with condescension, disdain, and even abuse, from the first moment of interaction.

Now most people I’ve worked for and done business with have been decent, many more have been polite, friendly and supportive, and some have been the loveliest people I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet, some have become dear friends. I consider myself lucky that in so many ways, throughout the course of my working life, I’ve enjoyed a great deal of moral and financial support, others’ concern for my well-being, a richness of interesting experiences, of opportunities to improve my situation, of the goodness of other people, and of the chance to expand my talents, exercise my creativity and problem solving skills, and best of all, to never stop learning.

But I also couldn’t possibly begin to make a full account of the number of times I’ve felt dismissed, condescended to, treated like a machine or a servant, and attacked for all manner of disappointments and inconveniences (real or perceived) whether I was responsible for them or not, simply by virtue of being on the other side of that counter, that receipt book, that telephone, that paycheck. I am also keenly aware how instrumental I was, or at least tried to be, in making that person’s life better at that moment. And this, again, is true of every working person in the world. Without us working people, no one could eat food, drink water, keep themselves and their homes and cities clean, travel, heal their ills, enjoy any luxuries, and so on, in comfort and security. And of course, the category ‘us working people’ include the vast majority of humanity. Most of us work for a living, and each job we do involves at least some kind of business interaction. It’s work that provides the (real) goods and services for sale in any business transaction. And almost all of us who live in this world have had many occasions to bemoan ill treatment in our capacities as workers and engagers in business.

This is where we arrive at the connection between the phrase ‘it’s just business’ and why it bothers me so much. I detest it because it expresses an attempt to dehumanize the interaction and, by extension, the person one does business with. It implies that one can remove the ‘human element’, the consideration of the other as a being with moral worth to whom we have certain obligations, from the realm of business. And if it’s not really a human interaction, therefore, one does not have to act with kindness, fairness, or respect.

I argue that this the attempt to dehumanize business is impossible: business is entirely about people. All business transactions are a type of human interaction. It’s true that when we make a bargain, when we exchange money for something we want, certain elements are added to the interaction. There are problems of fairness to be resolved, there’s customer loyalty to be won, the need for expediency may be pressing, and so forth. But all types of human interaction contain unique elements: all involve a particular combination of expectations, obligations, etiquette, and other considerations. The fact that it’s a business transaction, and not another kind, does not subtract from the basic fact that all parties are human beings to whom we owe a basic level of respect and courtesy.

Business, in this sense, is always personal.

Most of us, most of the time, recognize this. Most business, day to day, is conducted in a reasonably courteous and decent way. We greet the other person, we say thank you (if not always ‘please’), we ‘shake hands on it’. We don’t usually lie, steal, or bully to get what we want. We treat our colleagues and employees with decency at least when we come into direct contact with them, we praise their work and give them raises and bonuses if we can, we usually feel regret, at least on some level, if we feel we need to fire them, and we hope they do well in the future. When we consider the phrase ‘it’s just business’, we realize that it holds little meaning when considered in light of how we usually behave. Understood as ‘it’s just a human interaction that involves money,’ we realize it’s a rather meaningless statement.

So it appears clear that we resort to this phrase when doing the right thing by the person we’re doing business with becomes difficult or inexpedient to getting what we want. And I fear it’s became far too widely, and far too unquestioningly, accepted when used this way. Why have we come to acquiesce to the idea that when money enters an interaction, that its appropriate to overlook or cast aside our concern for the cost in human dignity, in respect, well-being, rights, justice, and simple decency? I fear that in our enthusiasm for the benefits of the marketplace, we too easily become complacent to what can be lost.

What we can lose is the respect we should have, as a central feature of our character, for the moral worth of others, and that if we let that slip, we undermine ourselves as social creatures, and in turn, everyone’s prospects for well-being. If our dignity, our moral worth, is up for sale, then the marketplace, ideally a highly cooperative, mutually beneficial institution, devolves into an arms ace where the most ruthless thrive in the short term, while trust erodes and the whole system of collapses in the long run. We can recognize this by comparing and contrasting various societies and their market systems, contemporary and historical. Oligarchies, tyrannies, rigidly enforced class systems and aristocracies, ideologically-based planned economies, are all extreme examples of how the disregard of individual human worth and dignity cause a marketplace to lose its ability to benefit all, and ultimately to self-destruct.

So, from a matter as minor as rudeness to a salesperson, to as serious as slavery, the same principle applies. The exchange of money for something we want or need makes no difference, morally, to the basic way we should treat anyone. That’s because, while goods or services are marketable, a person’s moral worth can never be, and should never be, up for sale.

It’s true that we’re sometimes justified in expressing anger and disappointment when doing business. Sometimes others fail, a little or a lot, in performing their part of the bargain or duties of their job, and we feel quite unfriendly when that’s the case. Sometimes others fail to provide good customer service, and are rude and unhelpful from the start. Sometimes others provide ‘services’ and products that are faulty, useless, or even harmful. In these circumstances it’s just to criticize their work, or to withhold or take back payment if the terms of the exchange aren’t fulfilled, or to let them know that you won’t be patronizing their business again. It’s appropriate, in such cases, and to voice one’s displeasure.

But this just reaction to the failure of the other to fulfill their part of the bargain is not what I’m criticizing here. It’s the unspoken attitude, unfortunately too widespread in my observation, that the person with the money in the exchange is automatically entitled to be abrupt and impersonal, to always demand, command, act impatient, and even abuse those they’re paying, in a manner inconsistent with respect for human dignity. It’s implied in the adage ‘the customer is always right.’ Are you the recipient of a payment, for goods or services, or as an employee on the clock? If so, many think, you are immediately transformed into a legitimate target for frustration, impatience, desire, greed, and sense of entitlement, whether or not you were responsible for the disappointment. In this sense, it feels as if you are no longer a person to them. Because if they consider you a person, wouldn’t they feel that they should be polite, respectful, or at a minimum, not rude or hateful to you, just as they would any other person?


Again, to argue that business is not personal, that it removes much or even all of the human element, is to make a very serious claim, with dire repercussions. It would imply that the moral worth of a human being is calculable in dollars and cents, and that it can be bought and sold. I argue that the number value of money and the degree of significance of a human life can never be aligned, and that you can’t ‘pay away’ your moral obligations towards any human being. When you pay for a good or a service, that, and only that, is what you pay for. Your payment does not apply in any way to your moral obligation to respect others.

One might object: ‘I didn’t choose to enter into any kind of relationship with the person I’m doing business with, they just happened to be the one I had to interact with to get something I need or want. Shouldn’t relationships be a matter of choice? Why, then, can’t a business interaction be impersonal, especially if members of a society agree that it’s impersonal?’

To begin with, all human interactions ultimately belong in the category of unchosen relationships. We stumble upon interactions with people all the time, and it’s a fact of life that all relationships occur because of chance circumstances, at least at first. We don’t choose for ourselves who we pass by on the street, who the open seat on the subway is next to, who our classmates, colleagues, or the new neighbors will be, who the people we already know will introduce us to, or who our parents, siblings, and relatives are. They become part of our world via circumstances out of our control. Since all human interactions belong in the same category. I argue, the same basic obligation to be just, polite, and respectful applies equally in all human interactions.

Secondly: one can no more give away or sell one’s own moral worth than they can choose to negate or buy another’s. That’s because human worth, mutual obligations of respect and duty and mutual dependence, are not merely a part of some unspoken contract. They are a feature of human nature by virtue of the fact that we are social and rational, and therefore, moral beings. ‘X cannot buy or sell away the moral with of Y‘ is equally true, if we are indeed rational, social beings, whether the variables X and Y are replaced in that statement by ‘you’ or ‘I’. (1)

It’s a fundamental part of the human condition that we are all bound together in a mutual web of obligation and dependency. Without one another, we would not get very far in life, and all we achieve, all we do, are the result of the combination of our own efforts with the contributions of others. One needs the ingenuity and knowledge of physics of the inventor and the architect when one needs a car, a bridge, a home, and owes a debt of gratitude for the resulting vast improvement in the ease and comfort of life. The inventor and the architect, in turn, needs the labor of the miner, the smelter, and the carpenter, and owes not only money, but respect and gratitude for supplying the raw material, without which their designs could not be realized, and for being among their clients, without which their wealth could not be earned and their work would not be needed. One needs the knowledge and skill and of the physician when health fails, and owes to her gratitude, admiration, and respect for the services she provides, and the hard work and intelligence it required to attain her abilities to heal. The physician needs the fruit of the work of the laborer in the field to sustain her life, and owes the laborer gratitude, admiration, and respect for the difficulty of the work performed and the fact that her life is sustained through his labor. The exchange of money is simply the means by which the exchange is organized; the basic fact that we all depend on each other, and have moral obligations to each other, is not altered by its usage.

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(1) Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature, 2011, Viking Penguin, New York. pp 647-648

Money and Deservingness

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A little while ago, I took part in a discussion about how medical care is paid for. It took a negative turn, as you would expect, since American health care is the world’s most expensive and the medical insurance field is highly dysfunctional. But the complaints were aimed especially at patients, since a couple of people I was talking to were jaded by observing apparent Medi-Cal fraud too many times over the years

I’ve been working in a medical office for nearly a year now, my first job in the medical field, and for the first time am getting a close look at what goes on behind the scenes at a doctor’s office: how many things can go wrong with skin (it’s a dermatologist’s office), how much patients are cheered and made to feel better by the simple act of talking with someone who can perhaps heal them, the complexities of billing and navigating the disparate requirements of insurance companies, the difficulties of receiving adequate medical care when one is disabled or poor, and so on.

The limits on what one can earn while receiving Medi-Cal, a free (to the patient, of course) state-run health care, are quite low, set at only 138% of the federal poverty level. For a state like California, with its relatively high cost of living, those limits are very much a low-ball estimate of what one can actually live on in an average California city. The qualifying limit on the yearly wage for a household of two, for example, is roughly the same as an average year’s rent alone.

Anyway, in the aforementioned conversation, anecdotes were passed around of people who present with Medi-Cal insurance, yet own expensive smartphones (data plans are not cheap, either!), nice clothes, talk about their vacations and nice cars, have tattoos and elaborate salon hairdos, and so on. This, of course, raised the question: how could they afford these things if they’re actually poor enough to qualify for Medi-Cal? Putting aside obvious objections, that they may have purchased those things before losing their jobs or becoming disabled, or that their family and friends supply the ‘luxuries’ as gifts, etc, the implication was that applying for taxpayer-funded health care should be an option of last resort, only after the smartphone is returned and the data contract expired, the nice clothes worn out, the valuable car sold.

One person proposed this solution: those too poor to afford health care insurance and other necessities of life should be given a one-time check. If they choose fritter it away and don’t spend it wisely, let them suffer the consequences. People who are responsible enough to have the money to pay for health care when they need it, should be the ones who get it; the rest are on their own.

I understand the frustration of those fellow conversationalists. We all know people who chronically don’t (can’t?) ‘keep it together’: they don’t (can’t?) get and keep decent jobs; they squander their money on junk food and useless luxuries and cheap trendy things that don’t last more than a season; they date or marry or make babies with ‘losers’ who drain their finances and don’t contribute; they don’t have a savings account for emergencies, and so on. Those habits are maddening, and don’t endear the possessor to those around them. Many of those habits drive their family and friends crazy, and arouse much resentment in others who end up paying the costs.

But I never hear the opposite argument: some people who have the money to pay shouldn’t get the healthcare resources. We know that some people who have money don’t contribute anything of value to society, and even do a lot of harm. There are some who make their money polluting or from sweatshop labor; there are some who are the lazy, spoiled, entitled children of wealthy parents; there are some who defraud their customers or knowingly sell toxic drugs to addicts; and so on. Why should they get to use up valuable, finite healthcare resources, then, if they, too, have lousy habits and are a drain or a bane to society?

So why the discrepancy? Does having money make one, generally, more deserving somehow? I think the discrepancy in our attitudes toward who should get health care, and who should not, reveal what most of us in the United States implicitly, unquestioningly accept, as a core value of American culture. It’s not so much that might makes right. Cash does. If you have the money to pay for something, you not only should get it, you deserve to get it. Period.

It’s not hard to see why we assume that this is so. We are a capitalist society, founded on the values of our country’s Calivinist founders. Money is the reward for our labor, and a sure sign, described as such in earliest Biblical times, of God’s approval. To accept money-as-deservingness as a core value is to encourage hard work, thrift, and innovation. Money is the surest way that a capitalist society automatically rewards its most productive, contributive members; obviously, those who work hard deserve the most money.

And very often, this is the case: doctors and other healthcare professionals, leaders of industry, civil-rights and defense lawyers as well as prosecutors, scientists, judges, professors and leading public intellectuals, and so on, do vastly important work, and they are, justly, well rewarded.

But wait a minute. How about those examples we just considered, of people who have money that don’t work hard or don’t contribute? There are myriad exceptions to the rule that the most deserving get the most money. A money-centric society also encourages theft, cheating, lying, fraud, ‘let-the-buyer-beware’ selling tactics… the list goes on and on.

And how about all those people we know whose work is among the hardest and most contributive, but who don’t make much money? In our country as in much of the world, for example, we are awash in a wealth of ready accessible, super cheap, delicious, quality food, such as the world has never seen before. That’s largely because masses of people work for subsistence wages, often in harsh conditions, for most of their waking hours, for years if not all of their life. In fact, the health and wealth of our society absolutely depend on these people’s labor, since without it, we are all impoverished, and would have little time and energy to expend in innovation, the arts, all the best things society a society produces, without a steady, high quality food supply.

But of course, the wages of field workers are not mostly determined by deservingness in accordance with the importance or value of the work done or the contribution made, and neither are the wages of most people. Wages are determined by supply and demand, or by how easy it is to replace one worker with another. Laboring in a field requires stamina and the will to work, but not education or highly skilled work experience. There are a seemingly endless supply of people who are willing to work in the fields for low wages in order to escape even worse living conditions or starvation, or increase the chances of success in their children’s future. The same conditions determine wages for myriad other areas of work, such as factories, restaurants, in-home and facility care for children and the elderly, and so on. And of course, there are those who did valuable work all their lives, until advances in technology rendered a lifetime of experience and skill useless. The stenographer, the postal worker, the journalist, the machinist, the autoworker, are seeing their jobs replaced by robots, computers, pundits, and overseas low-paid workers, and they are left middle-aged, suddenly unemployable, with large bills and children still demanding they make decent salaries, to start all over again in a job market that doesn’t need them anymore, with depressed wages for the entry-level work they must now accept when and if they can get it.

In contrast, there are those whose work is in demand because the product of their work is desirable, such as luxury goods, but the people who produce them are in short supply. Designers and developers of video games and movies, including violent and misogynistic ones, can make a great deal of money. Same goes for high-end fashion designers, CEOs of pharmaceutical companies, speculative bankers, plastic surgeons, lobbyists, and so on. The product of these people’s work range from the most beneficial, beautiful, and life-enhancing, to the most useless, harmful, and ugly; either way, the work they do can be highly lucrative, since their work is in high demand.

As we can see, the value of money-as-deservingness may originate from some of our best instincts and desires, such as justice in compensation, the liberty to pursue our own goals, and the drive to better the lives of ourselves and our children. But in the real world, things don’t play out that way, not by a long shot. The cynic, the cheat, the liar, the predator, is all too often more adept at making money than the honest, hard worker. The possession of money is not a reliable reflection of character, nor of the actual value of one’s contribution to society.

So as we’ve just seen, money-as-deservingness is deeply problematic at best, and nearly useless at worst. Money is a tool, nothing more, and the fickleness and vaguaries of the market, not worthiness of the work done, mostly determines who get the most.

So to return to the example we opened with: what conclusions should we have reached in our conversation about health care and who should have access to it?

It’s hard to say, exactly. It seems that collective action problems (the tragedy of the commons, for example) are part-and-parcel of every real-world society, and capitalism is one way around them, as it’s an (ideally) impartial, and therefore fair, way of allocating resources. This may solve many efficiency problems, but to my mind, it doesn’t solve a far too many other, even more important problems, including those that arise from our concern with justice, human flourishing, dignity, the value we place on individual human lives, and so on.

And we haven’t even considered the dilemma of how we are to care for people who are not ‘marketable’: constituted in such a way that they can’t contribute in the ways the market rewards: they don’t have the health, mental capacity, or perceived attractiveness that make them likely to get a decent job, even if they are able to try. Do we return to a society that depends only on elective charities to care for them, reneging on the commitment we’ve made over the years to take their care on as a collective responsibility? Remember, public assistance programs arose precisely because elective charities weren’t doing the job: if they were, there would have been no-one to need public assistance. Do we return to a eugenics-based belief system, where only the ‘fit’ deserve to survive? But this ignores that which makes human beings simultaneously the most intelligent, capable, and successful species: our highly developed social skills, in which we cooperate, pool our resources, and build on on the work and ideas of others to invent language, technology, and culture such as the world had never seen or likely will again if we eventually go the way of the dinosaurs. If we undermine our own moral sense and hard-heartedly ignore and dispose of the ‘unfit’, we blunt our moral sense and head down the path of mutually assured destruction, where it takes more and more qualifications to remain in the category of the ‘fit’. We’ve gone down that slippery slope before, have already caught a glimpse of such a dystopia in mid-century Europe.

My proposed solution? Re-classify and institute healthcare as the same sort of infrastructure as our system of roads and bridges, the military, the water supply, food-safety administration, our currency, and so forth, as all of these are basic necessities of life, communication, and trade. Collective action problems always have and always will exist, in the free market as well as in public welfare systems, and to give healthcare over to the vaguaries of the free market as if it’s an elective luxury, is a failure of our society’s commitment to the value of the life and liberty of each individual person. Our free-market healthcare system, which leaves so many without the care they need, is not a solution, it’s the result of a lack of political will and imagination, and a moral disgrace to boot.

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Sources and inspiration:

Ariely, Dan. Multiple works on behavioral economics, including his TED talks, lectures, and articles.
http://danariely.com/

Heath, Joseph. Economics Without Illusions, 2010.
http://books.google.com/books/about/Economics_Without_Illusions.html?id=4V8cvQo1Dw8C