accepting status, decoupling it from income and power
One of the core topics that parecon takes on is the question: how much should people get paid in exchange for their hard work? We come up with an answer that we think is fair, yet often leaves people feeling a little ill at ease. One reason I think people feel ill at ease with this answer is that, in capitalism, people’s income stands for more than the direct things which people benefit from; it stands for status.
When people engage in conspicuous consumption, for example, they aren’t buying luxury goods because they are so much more useful to them in the conventional sense. They are buying luxury goods as a marker for status. This might be obvious, but I think it’s vital: in every society, people care a lot about status. Status can come in many forms: ability to command resources, prestige, etc. In capitalism, it comes for the most part in terms of income, although some people prefer power, fame, or prestige.
If we want to create a fair society, we can not make our goal ridding the world of status. Some people in every society are inherently status-driven and that won’t ever change. Our goals instead, should be 1) flattening the status hierarchy, 2) providing status hierarchies in which being on the top isn’t so destructive to people on the bottom.
For the question of achieving the goal of flattening, I think we can look at the latest controversy about executive pay. How much more, the question goes, should the people at the top of a status hierarchy be paid? If left to run amok, the capitalist status hierarchy puts no limit on how much the people at the top should make, because they will always be in status competition with other people at the top. However, the people at the top–and some others–get very upset at hard caps on pay. It isn’t just because they want to have the money to spend; it’s because they want to be recognized for being successful. The CEO of Netflix argues for no caps on income, but high taxes. This, I believe, is implicitly an argument for using status to reward people. After all, if you let people declare their income to be $1M / year, but only let them keep $200K, they can still compete on status without having to actually allocate so many societal resources to them.
For the question of providing alternative status hierarchies, I think this is vital. In the world of free software, the most powerful, popular people in the community are the people who started successful projects: Linus Torvalds, Richard Stallman, Guido van Rossum, etc. Each of them is compensated for their efforts by one company or another, but only a small amount compared to those who started companies around their software. Their real reward is being widely admired for their creations. Because the free software world provides this recognition, it can maintain people’s inherent striving for status without allocating so many scarce societal resources to one pereson.
This, I believe, is a vital lesson for advocates of parecon: if you don’t want to reward achievement with money, you better have a lot of awards, admiration, and recognition to go around, to give people some sort of status to strive for.