Notes to Self on the Value of Jobs

These are some notes to myself on the value of jobs:

 

There is no such thing as unskilled, just unpopular skills. 

 

Some unpopular skills are unpopular for good reason, but there are also a lot of things people do to hold society together that they can't get people to pay them to do.

 

The longer I live, the harder it is for me to find truly lazy people. It is easy to find people who, for various reasons, waste a lot of energy doing things that don't add value to the world, but many of those get paid a lot for what they do anyway. (And then we find ourselves back at the question of why some skills are popular.)

 

Money is a proxy for value. It's a poor proxy, but it isn't money itself that is the problem until the causality inverts and money starts defining value. 

 

Also, it is hard to have things of value unless you can exchange them, and it's hard to exchange them without a proxy of some sort.

 

And it is impossible to contact without interfering. You can't move without contact at some level. Not interfering is not really an option.

 

Refraining from exploitation is closer to being possible, but that requires understanding one's own value system, and it is the lack of understanding the value system that causes problems with proxies for value.

 

Forgive the Student Debt!!! (Or Not?)

There are loud and numerous calls for forgiving the student debt. We've duped the poor (former) students into buying a worthless higher education on time, and dumped them into an economy where it is really hard to pay that debt back.

(Pardon me? I did not sell that snake oil. On either end.)

Well, there would be valid reasons for helping them get out from under that burden.

But.

"We" can't exactly forgive that debt. We don't own it. That is, we don't own the burden of guaranteeing it. At least, not at this time.

Who owns the guarantees on that debt?

Well, it's difficult to untangle. The government that demands business be transparent has serious difficulties making its own operations transparent. 

We hear China owns no small part of it. We can be fairly sure that most of the several thousand billionaires and millions of other high-net-worth-individuals all over the world also own no small part of it.

If we could get them all to forgive the student debt in all countries, I'm not sure that would be a bad thing. 

But what is being called for is something else entirely -- for the US government to buy that burden back from those who bought the bonds. 

So here's how it works. Get people to borrow money from you. Some time later, sell the burden of final guarantee for the burden to the government. That means, if the people who borrowed the money can't or don't repay it, the government has to pay you. Sometime later, get the government to "forgive the debt" by paying it off to you. And you get both the interest and the principle.

Here's what is not being told: "Forgiving the debt" ultimately means paying it off -- making those who are already rich all that much richer.

Those rich people were the ones who set the rules up to demand higher education, you see. "Our worker pool needs more training!" they said. (Who gave them permission to call us "their worker pool", anyway?)

So, as I said, if we could get them, not the government, to forgive the debt for student loans, that might not be such a bad thing. 

Except, there are reasons that's not such a good idea, either. Debt is never a simple thing. Those individuals of high-personal-worth actually serve to focus our economic activities on specific business. If they suddenly lose their wealth and somebody is not ready to step in with more money, businesses fail. Jobs disappear. Etc. Economic depression.

That was the excuse for bailing out the banks about ten years back, and it is real. Uhm, well, it isn't exactly entirely the stuff of the imagination of ambitious money-grubbers. It's real enough to cause ordinary people serious harm.

 Why? is a very good question.

If you don't understand why, it's time for you to learn what money means. 

None of the popular explanations you can find in books or on the web have it right. What does

Money is a proxy for value.

even mean? 

Okay, how about something that is often claimed,

Money is value.

Really? Bits of paper and metal, ink in a ledger, charge domains in some storage medium. But it took, for instance, Ms. Rowling a long time of working hard to convert the value in her first stories into enough money to continue writing without working a day job. 

At any rate,

Money is not raw value.

So, once again, how about 

Money is a proxy for value.

Money is not a very good proxy for value. The things that are of most value to you, you wouldn't want to trade for money. (Well, you shouldn't.) And usually, if someone wants to trade you money for them, it's less for the thing it is than for the control they hope to gain over you in the trade. So,

Money is power.

Yet it isn't power to do the most important things. If I mention the power to breathe, you may counter with the idea that money can buy doctors to fix your inability to breathe, but I already have the ability to breathe. Without money.

And a man who has ruined his ability to breath is often unable, even with billions of dollars, to hire enough medical expertise to fix his lungs before he dies. So, again, something money is not:

Money is not unlimited power.

Debt actually is more powerful than money, if you simply want to control people. Is it surprising that people buy and sell debt?

How about this one?

Money is freedom.

Rich people (and many wannebee rich people) write books detailing how they had to live according to very strict daily routines to get their wealth. You have to sacrifice for that freedom.

And, once they have it, they have to keep up the routine, because with the money came responsibility to manage a company or some such thing. 

Ask them if they are really free, and they say, they are free to hire a limousine to take them somewhere. But they are not free to walk there on their own. Free to buy expensive clothes, but not to wear comfortable clothes -- unless they have enough cachet to turn their comfortable clothes into a fashion statement. 

And money doesn't buy the cachet -- not on a long-term basis. Show your money and you get attention, but the minute you put your money away, the attention dries up. Real cachet takes more work.

Money is only temporary cachet.

In Hello Dolly, Horace says something like 

Money is like manure. It should be spread about making little green things grow. 

(US currency being printed with green ink added a certain overloaded semantic -- pun -- to that quote.)

My response when I first heard that was a bit pithy --

Money is like pus. It tends to gather where the wounds in society are.

Okay, I'll skip forward a bit. Money is a fairly good proxy for apparent value, much of the time. Thus, sales campaigns are battles to drive your own products' apparent value up in the market.

Money is an imperfect proxy, or exchange medium, for value. 

What happens when we forgive a debt -- assuming that the debt is truly forgiven and not just transferred to a new owner?

The money has already been plowed into the economy. And the former debt-owners lose the power that owning the debt gave them. But it does give the former debtor a bit more room to make more value to bring back into the economy.

I suppose I could wrap this rant up by offering one or more opinions, either on student debt or on something really abstract like the lack of dimensionality in current financial instruments, but I want to leave a certain question dangling:

The question is not why we shouldn't give the former students a little more breathing room. 

The real question is what do we keep doing wrong with money, so that it keeps ending up getting in the way when people want to do good things?

Vaccines, Reducing the Population by Reducing the Mortality Rate, and Bill Gates

Vaccines are neither pure good nor pure evil.

Neither is money.

I was reading, maybe on Snopes or whatever that is, about comments on vaccines that Bill Gates made that were misinterpreted or something.

(It's recent news, January of this year or so. You can find it now with a simple web search on "bill gates vaccines", so I'll leave you to the vicissitudes of the Web if you want to read the sources.)

Bill Gates said something to the effect that he is trying to focus on indirect methods of reducing population, and that reducing the mortality rate by increasing the use of vaccines was part of his indirect efforts.

Some clown didn't read all of what Gates said, and claimed that Gates was admitting that vaccines kill people.

But Gates was really talking about the principle that has been found recently, that the birth rate in "advanced" societies falls far enough to well offset the lengthened lifespans.

(Japan, for instance, is looking at negative population growth without immigration, which is part of why it is becoming easier to immigrate now. Wish they'd let me keep dual citizenship so I could vote where I live without putting myself completely at the mercy of a USA immigrations "service" gone insane, should I ever go back.)

This is way oversimplifying what Gates said, but his argument goes something like this --

{paraphrase}... parents who are no longer worried about their children dying before they are old enough no longer get in a panic and have a dozen kids.{paraphrase.}

(Old enough for what? That doesn't seem to be clear.)

Okay. He's smart enough to see one of the less-obvious socio-statistical relationships, although his description misses what I think is the salient point:

{real-principle} Young kids who think that they can have sex with impunity quit worrying about babies and start trying to have sex with impunity. {real-principle.}

That's what drives the population down -- whether they use contraceptives and prophylactics, or whether the spread of STDs sterilizes almost everyone who doesn't die.

Having babies safely requires more planning ahead than using contraceptives.

The idea that having and raising children is no longer dangerous (which is not true), so they can always do the responsible thing after they've had their fun is just one part of the evil package.

And so one or more of his charities funds vaccines for poor people.

Are we going to set aside these facts about vaccines --

1. that no vaccine is perfect, 
2. that some vaccines are way too dangerous to be even offered generally, 
3. and that parents should almost always be given the choice for their young children,
4. because it's the parents who have to deal with the worst of the consequences if their child happens to be one of those for whom the vaccine goes wrong?

Vaccines for poor people probably does more good than bad, overall.

But the wannabees who look at Bill Gates as their example decide that

Bill Gates says vaccines are good.

and therefore

vaccines == absolute good!

and start trying to force, whether by legislation or by word-of-mouth flash propaganda campaigns on slashdot and reddit, everyone in the world to get all the latest-greatest vaccines.

Let me provide an example of something I personally have experience with.

My children's junior high school, about four years ago, strongly recommended that all the young women in the school get the cervical cancer vaccine (or whatever they called it).

But my daughter is not having random sex. Maybe she's doing things her parents don't know about, but she is not having sex with random partners on a daily or even weekly basis.

And the odds of negative side-effects for that vaccine are relatively high.

That means that, for her, the odds are better if she simply abstains from both pre-marital sex and the vaccine. Way better if she simply abstains from pre-marital sex.

She chose not to get the vaccine, after listening to both the school and her parents.

Now, some of her friends are already seeing the negative health effects of having taken the vaccine.

Vaccines are not a panacea.

So, Gates still is not necessarily helping the world (overall) with his vaccine campaigns.

If Bill Gates is really going to repent of getting his billions by scamming us, he is going to have to quit trying to "fix" the world's problems.

That is to say, if he wants to fix the evil he has done, he has to give up the idea that he knows how to fix other people's problems. He is not as smart as he thinks he is.

No one, when we start telling other people what they should do, is nearly as smart as we want to think we are.

(That's why, by the way, Mormon missionaries are instructed to stick to the basics of faith and repentance, and to encourage individuals get the specifics directly from God, through exercising their own consciences.

We can tell you that you need to repent, just because you aren't dead yet. Yeah, we aren't dead yet, either, so we need to repent, too.

Just what you need to do to repent is between you and God. Prayer is good, once you can tell the difference between the sneaky voice in your head telling you to take unfair advantage of your neighbor and the quiet voice in your heart telling you to help your neighbor without asking for gain.

All we want is to encourage everyone to get serious about trying to be better people today than we were yesterday.)

Gates can, in fact, do great things with his immorally gotten gains, on certain conditions.

He could, for instance, set up a no-strings-attached 20 million dollar permanent fund for Theo deRaadt and his friends to run the openbsd project from. And hope the sudden influx of money doesn't ruin the project.

Or he could go to crowdfunding places like kickstarter and fund random projects. And, again, hope that he doesn't end up funding projects that shouldn't be funded for some reason not visible in their proposals.

Hey, he could give me three million Japanese yen (roughly USD 30 thousand) to finish one of my novels. And a hundred million Japanese yen (roughly USD 1 million) to start re-inventing the computer/information industry from zero.

And, if he did, should he hope it's just enough money to keep me permanently spinning my wheels here in my own little world where I won't be bothering anyone?

Or should he hope that it will be just enough money to get my first novel published and selling, and just enough that I can set up a website from which to sell digital copies of the novel, with new free-and-open source software of my own creation, and to start building the next big thing in social media?

He's in a dilemma. He has more money than one person can safely burn off.

• If he puts strings on the money he gives away, he changes the world for the worse by those strings. 
• If he just gives the money away unconditionally, the mere excess of resources will allow many people to do things they shouldn't.
• If he just hoards the money, society is dragged down by the lack of what he hoards.

If he really wants to save the world, he has to learn the difference between right and wrong, and he owns the USD 8×10¹⁰ wall that prevents him from seeing right and wrong well enough to safely get rid of that wall.

And the first thing he has to see is that it is impossible to make the other guy to the right thing.

And that is why I don't want Gates' billions, and why I would be hard pressed to accept it if he even offered me a few tens of thousands USD.

Now, if he, or you, would just read my novel -- current draft here and first draft here -- and tell me in the comments why you think I should or should not keep writing it, that would sure help me now. Yeah, I need a new job or something, but there are things I need more than just money.

There are things that we all need more than money. And if money gets in the way, we should put the questions of money behind us.