In the Dark

I noticed last week that the United Kingdom has a new Home Secretary, the ironically-named James Cleverly, who has taken over the task of making the country even more xenophobic. Among the measures he is proposing is hiking the minimum salary needed for skilled overseas workers from £26,200 to £38,700. That figure has come as a shock to scientific researchers, as the entry level for a new postdoctoral researcher in the UK is about £36-37K. No foreign postdocs, please, we’re British! I wonder how this squares with the recent (belated) decision to join Horizon 2020? I don’t see this latest bout of small-mindedness doing much to repair the damage done by a two-year absence from the programme.

Anyway, the decision to set a high salary threshold for skilled migrants, reminded me of something that struck me when I read David Graeber’s book Bullshit Jobs. It’s really just a side issue in the context of that book, and it’s probably something well known to students of ethics, but I found it interesting:

In English, as currently spoken, we tend to make a distinction between “value” in the singular, as in the value of gold, pork bellies, antiques, and financial derivatives, and “values” in the plural: that is, family values, religious morality, political ideals, beauty, truth, integrity, and so on. Basically, we speak of “value” when talking about economic affairs, which usually comes own to all those human endeavors in which people are getting paid for the work or their actions are otherwise directed at getting money. “Values” appear when that is not the case. For instance, housework and child care are, surely, the single most common forms of unpaid work, Hence we constantly hear about the importance of “family values”.

Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber, p. 203

The point of relevance here is that defining the “value” of a job only in the sense of how large the salary is misses the fact that the financial reward isn’t the only sort of value that a job has; there is social value too. As far as I am aware, though, there is no really satisfactory theory of social value. On the other hand, it does seem that many jobs with the highest social value (care worker, nurse, primary school teacher, etc) are poorly paid, i.e. have low financial value. Nevertheless, people still do them. Why is that? It’s because people are motivated by things other than money – values. It’s possible to find work rewarding in a way that’s not primarily financial. That’s yet another reason why it is daft to measure the success of a University course in terms of the salaries of those who graduate from it.

One thing that confuses me is that there seem to be people – perhaps many of them – who actively resent those who find their work enjoyable or fulfilling. This sometimes manifests itself as exploitation. Take nurses, for example. I think we all agree that health services would fall apart without them, but the are routinely denied decent monetary reward for their work. One can’t live off values. A system that drives nurses out of the profession due to financial hardship is truly rotten.

As a University Professor, I’m well off financially, but that’s not the reason I chose a career as an academic. I don’t think the reason is simple, actually, among the factors are: (a) I think science is important and wanted to make a contribution; (b) I enjoy teaching; and (c) I didn’t want to be bored (in other words I didn’t want a bullshit job).