Earning Power
I have a friend. She is an actor in Chicago.
People are skeptical she’ll “make it” – whatever anyone means by that.
“Good luck!” they say. “It’s a one in a million shot. You’ll be waiting tables your whole life.”
“I was born to act,” she replies. “I cannot do anything else.”
My friend opened her heart to me recently. She detailed all that goes into trying to act for a living. She is on unemployment and auditions for something at least 5 times per week. She gets callbacks. She tries to keep herself from getting too excited about cool auditions; she knows a lot of politics and luck go into getting great roles. But of course a piece of her is ecstatic, hoping that this will be the start of an era where she will get to do what she was made for – and earn enough money to do anything other than just pay the rent.
“If you need money, get another job,” they say.
“Wait tables while you audition. At least then you’ll have a stable income.”
She replies, “Well, then I say goodbye to unemployment money and have to work enough to make all that back – at minimum wage. So then I’d be working full-time for minimum wage and certainly won’t have time, energy, or scheduling flexibility to audition like I have been. That only makes my chances of getting a gig even lower. And what do I get in return for these lower odds?
Still barely enough money to pay rent and nothing else.”
She forces herself to work on auditions for commercials she doesn’t care about. Bringing in extra money through acting feels a little better than scouring for cash in other ways, even if it means plugging pharmaceuticals and toxin-filled cleaning products, generally having her talent instrumentalized in the name of consumerism.
“So give up on your dream,” they say.
“Do something you hate in exchange for survival. That’s what most of us do, anyway.”
“Never,” she replies. “I would rather die.”
This is not a story about a struggling artist. It is a story about power.
“Isn’t it random and weird which skillsets society decides to reward with money?” they say.
“No,” I say. “Actually, not random at all.”
The Aerospace Industry: High Middle Class Income, Low Societal Power
Another friend of mine makes a good bit of money for a person his age.
“He’s doing well for himself,” they say.
“What a smart, responsible, successful young man. It’s so nice to see him living up to his potential.”
He’s an aerospace engineer. Aerospace engineers help build anything from airplanes and spacecrafts to satellites and military ballistic missiles, depending on the company. The aerospace industry is really split into two subcategories: defense (aka government) and non-defense, or commercial.
This is how the aerospace industry (at least in the United States) works in broad strokes, when the government is involved.
When the government needs an airplane, for-profit companies in the private (or non-public) sector make money. The US government generally buys airplanes; it has never really had the infrastructure to build them. Boeing, a publicly-traded, profit-driven company, has long been a favorite aircraft supplier for the US government. The profits it makes benefit its shareholders – individuals and funds with enough wealth to purchase shares of the behemoth company on a public trading exchange.
When the government needs a spacecraft, different for-profit companies make money. (These companies, which may be publicly traded or privately held, are owned by very, very rich people.) The US government used to build its own spacecrafts (NASA), but now they often contract space work out to billionaire-owned spaceship companies like Space X (owned by Elon Musk) and Blue Origin (owned by Jeff Bezos).
Additionally, this is how the commercial aerospace industry (at least in the United States) works in broad strokes.
When a company wants to sell airline tickets to the general public, they buy a plane from another private company. On both ends of the transaction, companies (and consequently, their owners or shareholders) make money.
When a private company wants to sell airplanes to (rich) people, they do it. Again, that company makes money.
Perhaps my aerospace friend helped build a passenger jet, and that, in turn, helped me visit family across the country. Or perhaps he helped build a missile, defending this nation by building tools that could kill people – but which we expect will only be aimed at people on other lands. But when you boil it down to the basics, my aerospace engineer friend is ultimately spending his work days making someone else richer – and those someones are typically C-suite executives and shareholders. (John Oliver’s piece on Boeing does a particularly shocking and in-depth job of detailing the business-oriented-to-a-fault machine of Boeing – with plenty of comedic relief.)
For my friend’s “noble” work in making rich people richer, he is rewarded with a pretty good salary. In fact, according to the Aerospace Industries Association, (American) aerospace engineers make 55% more, on average, than the average American. I imagine this will only intensify as billionaire spacecraft entrepreneurs boldly pioneer brand new industries – brand new ways for other rich people to spend money on extravagant space vacations. And for that emerging, “noble” work, perhaps there will be even more financial reward for those employees helping make it possible. (But of course, never enough financial reward for aerospace employees to afford those space vacations, themselves.) Here I think it’s important to note: these billionaires could be using their capital to set up incredible, useful, low-carbon infrastructure to help folks get where they need to go. They could help support energy efficient, environmentally and socially just public transportation projects in cities; they could set up high-speed train systems to whisk us away for an affordable, less fuel-intensive weekend to somewhere fun nearby. Instead, a handful of elites get private jets and the prospect of space vacations. Meanwhile the rest of us squeeze our legs into ever-shrinking “economy” class seating – and count ourselves lucky if the doors don’t fly off the plane in mid-air.
To be clear: none of this is a criticism of my friend who works in aerospace. It is not a criticism of anyone who works in aerospace (except, perhaps, those who own the capital, have substantial authority and influence over the priorities of this industry, and/or skim the profits generated through the labor of a massive workforce who make the whole enterprise possible).
Rather, my critique is meant to lay bare how little power my aerospace friend has in society. If the aerospace industry crumbled one day, he has some skills that could be helpful in other areas: he could code a nifty app, and he’d have a decent (read: mathematically-informed) shot at building sound structures. Don’t get me wrong, he is curious and smart and resourceful. He would bring rich care and support to his community. But his highly specialized skills that inform structural analysis of aircrafts are not exactly crucial for human survival and thriving. They are just particularly valuable to some large, complex money-making machines that serve rich people who own lots of capital. He is a cog in a much larger, profit-driven machine. He builds the parts he is told to build. And if he doesn’t like building this part, he can switch roles or companies to build another part. But, as long as he is an aerospace engineer, he will always be trading time as a cog for survival – albeit a 55% more financially comfy survival than the average American.
Public Health: Medium Middle Class Income, Medium Societal Power
I work for a public health non-profit. I make less money than my aerospace engineering friend.
“How noble,” they say. “It’s so important to [research teen vaping rates, help pharmaceutical companies develop drugs, teach children in Africa to read…and so on]. And she’s taking a pay cut for the cause.
What a smart, altruistic, successful young woman.”
Public health researchers don’t usually make as much as aerospace engineers. Some people think that’s largely because aerospace engineering is “harder” or requires more school. Or maybe it’s simply a supply and demand problem: maybe more people want to be public health researchers than want to be aerospace engineers? From where I sit, though, it sure looks like it’s because public health isn’t as efficient or effective at making rich people money.
For one thing, a lot of public health research is done in non-profit frameworks. So if there is a money-making scheme there, it is less obvious. Nonprofits typically rely on grant funding, which is often subject to the whims and current fascinations of rich people and their foundations. And those grants often come with strings attached, onerous reporting requirements, and the ever-present need to make sure that the funder is both satisfied with and not bored by the work and the results. When there are strings attached, these nonprofits have to spend a lot of time and energy satisfying the strings. This tends to make the nonprofit less effective and efficient, at achieving their goals for social or public good. As a result, nonprofits will rarely be both well-resourced and effective. Nonprofits, however, are a pretty good vehicle for the wealthy to appear benevolent through their philanthropy and get some nifty tax benefits in the process.
My experience in public health, though, has largely been as part of a large government contractor. That means the company sells research and “thought partnership” to governments, both federal and state. Just because a company is a government contractor doesn’t mean it can only work with the government. The company can work with private companies, too. In public health, pharmaceutical companies are frequently client-collaborators.
But I’m still trying to figure out why I make less money than my aerospace engineering friend. Wouldn’t we rather have more health than more rockets? A key to this investigation is to figure out what would happen if public health work were to be successful. For instance, if my aerospace engineer friend’s work is successful, there is an airplane or rocket to sell. If public health research is successful, society would have a healthier population. But knowing whether or not a healthy population is actually good for the economy is tricky.
On the one hand, it’s easy to imagine how they might be good for the economy. For one, healthy people can go to work as laborers, dutifully increasing GDP. And it’s easy to imagine an app or drug that might make someone healthier, thus selling a product that further increases GDP. But an app or drug that makes someone healthier in a sustainable way, is actually a bad business model: the customer (newly healthy person) will no longer need your product or service once they are healthy. This is similar to curing an illness and the person no longer needing to pay for treatment.
Plenty of people claim healthy people are good for the economy, the strongest connection often being that healthy people can go to work.
I think the truth may be a little darker.
Truly healthy people might be good for some parts of the economy – perhaps the outdoor recreation industry, for example. But they are bad for many other parts of the economy. Truly healthy people don’t need to be on all kinds of expensive medications that make rich people who own pharmaceutical companies richer. Truly healthy people don’t need to go to the doctor as often, so healthy people are bad for the bottom line of health insurance companies – and for pharmaceutical and medical device companies, and also for the supplement purveyors, wellness influencers, and peddlers of all kinds of cure-alls. In an economy where healthcare and wellness are big business, the economy would definitely prefer to keep those paying customers coming in the door.
My perspective is that neither sick people, nor truly healthy people are particularly helpful for the economy. Rather, the most economically efficient state for humans to be in is “just sick enough to still go to work.”
Think about it: the economy thrives when we aren’t thriving. It does better (grows more) when we don’t have enough time or energy or sufficient networks of care to cook and eat the healthy, community-stewarded food our bodies crave, so we subsist on processed, usually nutritionally bankrupt junk from chain grocery stores and fast-casual restaurants. The economy thrives when we work all day at computers to increase GDP, often in bullshit jobs, and then buy gym memberships (further increasing GDP) as a feeble attempt at giving our bodies the movement they need to stay healthy.
And when we get acutely sick or struggle continually with chronic illness, we give the economy a boost when we get bumped back to that “surviving, not thriving” level of health by the industrialized medical industry and have to purchase various and sundry remedies to ease our suffering.
It sort of feels like we are cars – useful machines – regularly fueling ourselves at chain grocery stores (and occasionally chain gas stations, when we really want that bag of chips while we’re fueling our actual cars, or worse, when we live in food apartheid zones and have no better options for food retail). Then we go in for regular oil changes, our bodies periodically maintained by the Jiffy Lube’s of healthcare. (This Jiffy Lube analogy is not even that far off: did you know clinics are being bought up by big businesses like hospital systems and insurance companies?)
The whole system seems set up to blunt the impact that public health researchers and professionals could have. We routinely hand solid research to the government (for example, the FDA or the CDC), but those agencies rarely have the political will, the funding, or the legal authority to do anything about it. So, this public health professional is often left wondering about the point of finding credible solutions to public health quandaries. If society won’t or can’t implement or act upon our findings to promote the common good, why do we keep investigating ills and suggesting fixes?
Public health work is dancing this dark tango: figure out how to make people healthier (and perhaps just healthy enough to show up for work until the final decade or so of life), but never healthy enough to thrive. For the most part, public health workers get paid to look like we are making progress in public health (“A Sexy Headline” or “A New Proposed Regulation”), while the population largely does not get healthier, or worse, slips further into their GDP-growing state of ill, inflamed, or slowly degrading survival, while sinking ever further from thriving.
To be clear, many people working in public health have unquestionably honorable intentions. For many of them, making people healthier is both their life’s passion and a core component of their identity. They feel fortunate to spend their days trying to make people healthier while “making a decent living for themselves.” Maybe they aren’t paid the 55% above average wage of the aerospace engineer (or if you’re in big pharma, perhaps it’s way above the 55%). But by and large, they believe they are doing all they can to make a difference in public health while securing their financial health as well. People take different routes for justifying their work, or for believing in it. Some working in big pharma rationalize and ease their discomfort by working on rare diseases. Here, there is less money to be made and the possibility of being part of bringing a life-saving drug to market that might eventually be available to someone who otherwise wouldn’t have any other options for treatment or symptom management. (Nevermind that the option they create often winds up being unaffordable for most). Some working in research capacities think that if they just publish enough good research, a policy maker will cite them in a new regulation that will curb the profit of the extractive industry. (Here, I am thinking of a new FDA rule that will require color graphics and new text warnings on packages of cigarettes.)
Just about everyone working in public health cares about one or more facets of health. But they can’t look too closely at – or change – the fact public health work is good for the economy because it is largely ineffective. And if it weren’t good for the economy (and they were effective), they might wind up working themselves out of a job.
Once again, I’m really not here to criticize people working in public health. After all, I’m one of those people! But I do think it’s important to name that while friends and family call me a “successful” member of society, “doing good for myself,” my work is doing very little, if anything, to help anyone else – except maybe to help make some rich people somewhere a bit richer. But if the industry crumbled, or if incentives changed, many public health researchers and workers have skills that could help humans thrive. In other words, the work we do probably could help our communities if the economic structures dictating so much of what’s possible allowed it. For example, what if I could use my skills to help my county more effectively allocate resources to heal our community from the opioid crisis targeted straight at us as a rural county in Appalachia?
In aerospace, while we could have public transportation and high-speed trains, we instead have private aerospace pioneering a space vacation industry. In public health, instead of good jobs making people and communities healthier, we instead have big pharma and research hidden behind paywalls.
The Arts: Low Middle Class Income, High Societal Power
Let’s come back to my actor friend. She does not make much money. But if she gets her big break, she will never want for money again. How is it that artists are both some of our society’s most financially fragile, and simultaneously, some of our most financially secure?
Again, I think it has to do with power. Artists who make a lot of money often have very little power in their own careers, though they may be able to make public statements or garner lots of followers on social media. My actor-friend’s partner has worked in the entertainment industry for a long time, and he shared insight into how high-profile actors walk through the world.
To play in the big, brightly lit parts of the industry (e.g., Hollywood, Broadway), actors need agents. Agents are the profit-extracting middle-men. They are firms that are in-the-know about all the auditions happening in an area – they have connections with the influential casting directors and the producers (entertainment financiers and speculators) to whom they answer. Agents hook up some of their clients (the actors) with auditions and provide advice on acceptance of roles. If an actor gets cast and takes the gig, the agency gets a cut of the actor’s pay.
There are a handful of very powerful talent agencies. Most of the big-name actors work with one of these agencies. And often, actors are largely kept in the dark about negotiations happening behind the scenes. The agency’s job is to get the most money possible for the actor (and, in turn, for themselves), in exchange for the smallest time commitment possible. Some of those negotiations might be nasty or manipulative. Agencies will use negotiation techniques like slow-walking their client’s commitment in the face of a deadline so the producer gets desperate and says, “Fine! We’ll pay them whatever you ask! Just please let this big-name actor commit so that the theater will give us a contract for this season!” But if you ask the actor why they haven’t committed to the role yet, they probably would have no idea. The agency, however, doesn’t want producers to talk directly to actors, it would be unseemly to make a great artist deal in the drudgery of money and negotiation! They must preserve their pristine creative spirit for their art. In practice, this means that the actor is often told what gigs they will take, and when, and leaves them flying from set to set, often asking only the basics: Where is the script? What plane do I get on? And what’s my hotel? Room number? Many of the big actors are so shielded from the “drudgery” of decision-making, that their big time agents wind up taking their agency. The working actors who make a comfy living are in many ways no different from the aerospace engineer: a cog in a money-making machine. Rather than churning out aircrafts, they are churning out the stories the money-making machine requests and rewards. And often, those stories aren’t even very good. These days, we see a lot of high concept comedy, which largely serves as distraction; remakes and screen adaptations of successful books as low-risk, high-reward proven stories that are familiar and especially nostalgic; formula rom-coms; and superhero narratives of exceptional protagonists, often seeking to “save the world” by maintaining the status quo.
Hollywood and Broadway are the primary avenues where an actor can make substantial income. And on those money-making avenues, actors are also making rich people richer. On the avenues where acting makes rich people richer, art can be profit and status-increasing, but it is mostly treated as superfluous – a luxury item. Dinner and a show. Champagne and a gallery opening. A weekend of cocktails and “the arts.”
Which now leaves us to consider my friend. Why does society make it so hard for her to maintain financial security?
“She doesn’t make much money because she was naive enough to pursue something so superfluous
and risky,” they say. “Besides, it’s simple supply and demand.
More people want to be actors than we have jobs for.”
I say, “Society doesn’t allow her to make money because her talents make her too powerful.”
My friend doesn’t need Hollywood or Broadway to be an artist. She can use her talents in ways that will never make rich people richer. She can tell new stories. She can imagine ways the world could be different, and then show people what it could be like – expressing alternatives with her body and voice alongside other artists who contribute their selves, talents, and expressions to the endeavor. She can make people feel. She can weave stories of empathy and joy and discovery that change people and connect people. When she channels her gift in these ways, she both possesses and deploys the awesome power to shift paradigms and narratives. She even has the power to awaken power in others, and to access and provide so many ingredients for human meaning – for human thriving.
That’s simply too much power to let rest in the hands (and bodies, voices, and expressions) of those who aren’t working to preserve the status quo and produce profits for those who are already enjoying the spoils of the system as it stands. Under neoliberal capitalism, most artists have to be dependent. Desperate. They must experience such precarity that even when they get a gig they hate (or have moral objections to), they are compelled to take it. Selling a cosmetic they know doesn’t work? Well, it pays the bills. Acting in a film that’s going to get 20% on Rotten Tomatoes? That pays the bills, too. Telling a tired story that uses racist / patriarchal / homophobic / transphobic / rugged individualist tropes? It all eases the credit card debt and chips away at that ever-growing student loan balance.
When my friend does what she loves, not what pays the bills, she has too much power. When she uses her gift to liberate the mind or the heart – or even just to name important questions on a small stage in her own community – she cannot make money. And if she doesn’t aesthetically conform to either mainstream / dominant standards of beauty or a very small assortment of niche tropes for sidekick and villain types, she won’t be cast at all. Artists have to be both desperate and conformist so that they have no choice but to tell the stories society is already churning out. The artist’s power and potential to embody and intrigue through alternatives threatens the system.
—
Something I’ve only alluded to so far, but which I want to make clear, here: while it seems the more you get paid per hour of labor, the less societal power you hold (at least unless and until you manage to become truly wealthy and transcend the need to trade your labor hours for wages), the opposite may be true of esteem.
The aerospace engineer is “doing well for himself,” they say.
“What a smart, responsible, successful young man.”
They say the public health researcher is a “smart, altruistic, successful young woman.”
Meanwhile they say the artist is “naive” or “irresponsible.”
If she is on unemployment, they might even call her “entitled” or “a freeloader.”
The Greek chorus of our culture tries to shame people into surrendering their meaning and their dreams. They lavishly praise those of us with classic 9:00-5:00 jobs – and especially congratulate those of us in “exempt” managerial positions who don’t have to clock in and out but are expected to be always available. They let us know how “successful” and “responsible” we are in exchange for surrendering our dreams, or worse, never letting ourselves dream to begin with. We get praise and promises of “security” – health insurance and 401k matching programs – until it’s time to cut costs and that security vanishes with a round of layoffs.
There are other labels the Greek chorus uses to enforce these metrics of success, too. Teachers are “noble” for choosing to do something meaningful despite low pay and low prestige. Healthcare workers are “heroes,” so they can’t show signs of exhaustion or burnout or humanity in the face of work conditions no human can reasonably sustain. Grocery store clerks and Amazon warehouse workers are invisible, until they start dying in the midst of a pandemic, and then we decide they can be “heroes,” too, because they are there to protect society; we have no intention of collectively protecting them.
—
So where does this leave us? An aerospace engineer is a cog in a money-making machine, and he is “successful.” A public health researcher is a cog in a money-making machine, designed to look like something helpful, and she is “successful.” A “successful” actor is idolized by society, but has no agency of his own. And an artist who hasn’t “made it” yet is just trying to get by and is called “naive” or worse, despite the immense power she holds in every fiber of her being.
I think the secret here must be that money – and the ability to earn it with relative predictability based on sustained effort – isn’t power – at least not among a wide and varied swath of the working class. (Those with so much money that they can influence policy are in a different category.) But if money isn’t power, what is?
My newest hunch is that we must all reclaim the artists and creators inside of us. My actor friend has shown me that maybe we need to look to the parts of ourselves that feel the most true to find what is most powerful. We must all reclaim the pieces of ourselves that society and capitalism refuse to value, and realize just how much power is coursing through those parts of us. And then the real trick will be to use that power to tell new stories and to build new worlds. Some of us can and should do that from right where we find ourselves. Anarchists have long talked about building new world(s) in the shell of the old. Maybe more of us need to build new sectors, industries, professions and vocations within the ones we trained for by courageously acting out unexpected stories, flipping scripts at just the right moments, and engaging in unexpected improvisation.
As the mountain of modernity erodes around us, we'll need the actors, and the public health workers, and the engineers, and the countless other people with varied skills and passions. But we'll need their efforts redirected. We won't need the money-making bits of us – the parts that we are told are “marketable” or “successful.” We’ll need the powerful parts, the messy parts, the parts that threaten the savage structures of legacy systems, and the parts that can salvage the best bits of the past and present to restructure and resystem and reworld. I think we will find that those very same parts are the parts that make us human.
"It's too out there. Too different. Too risky,” they say.
“It'll jeopardize your career, your livelihood, everything you've worked for."
“Yes,” I say. “Let's hazard all that so we can go be humans together.”