What Is Your Work Worth, Really?

I am no economist, but a question which obsesses me is why the pay scale of American jobs is structured so that any worker who is involved in cultural work gets payed lower than any other kind of worker. I am completely at a loss as to why the more specialized reading, writing, editing, or teaching skills a job requires, the less you are likely to get paid. The fact that writing-related skills are so poorly remunerated strikes me as counter-intuitive, since at the high school and college level, most students struggle with writing skills, the economic logic of supply and demand would seem to dictate that people with good writing skills entering the workforce would be fewer, thus more valuable, thus well-paid. But in fact, the opposite is true: barely literate stockbrokers rule the world! The aformentioned fact is not terribly surprising to me because people who get paid to move money around have always been paid better than people who don't move money around; what's shocking and revealing to me is the difference in pay between the people who move money around in the humanities and the people who actually teach and write and do the actual cultural work of cultural institutions.

The presidents and directors of these various cultural institutions would argue that there's a simple economic answer: that jobs in sectors that employ people coming out of school with degrees in the arts/humanities are not the kinds of places that have all that much money to throw around in the first place: museums, libraries, schools, publishing houses, universities, etc. compared to a bank or General Motors or Enron. And while I see that yes obviously, most of these places can't afford to pay all of their employees six figures and stay in business, this explanation does not account for why a bureaucrat's starting salary at a large public university would be 50,000 dollars a year with full health benefits while an adjunct at that same university would be getting 2,500 per back-breaking section (that means you have to teach eight sections a year to make 20k before taxes, and that's without health benefits). It doesn't explain why an editorial assistant at a corporate publishing house makes a starting salary of 25,ooo dollars (living in New York City, no less!) while an entry-level job in the marketing department of that same corporation starts at 50-60k. These institutions with humanistic values would have you forgo health insurance and pay its board members 200k (and that's a low ball figure) for the most minor functions of being a board member. It's insulting. These situations are really instructive in showing us what our values are as a culture. Do we value culture, even in its most utilitarian form–education? No, we do not.

The utter monetary devaluation of cultural work is happening concurrently with changes in American class structure. A defining characteristic of American society, one which is deeply ingrained in the American psyche, is the idea that with hard work anyone can be upwardly mobile. But wages have actually stagnated since the 1970's. You're more likely now than at any time during the 20th century to be born and die in the same class, which additionally sucks because the underclass is growing and getting poorer. A college degree used to be the gateway to being economically middle-class but more and more, a college degree is a gateway to being culturally middle-class, but not economically middle-class because students graduate with such enormous amounts of student loan and credit card debt and go into careers which often don't offer much to help relieve this debt. This kind of semi-poverty is a terrible irony.