As this pandemic drags on, it raises important questions about the value of what each of us does for a living, especially when compared to the amount of money that we make for those jobs. There isn’t a day that goes by right now, when somebody doesn’t talk about the heroes who are working in the medical field, or the heroes who are working on the front lines, or the heroes working in the grocery stores and providing us with essential goods and services, and so on. The question that needs to be asked whenever we discuss all these people, is how we assign a monetary value to what they do, especially when we are all calling them heroes right now.
Should heroes be paid only the minimum legal wage for the work that they do? Should heroes be forced to work ridiculous hours, exposing themselves to the public just so they can feed their kids, while we sit in the comfort of our homes, making more money as we chat on Zoom video calls? If what these people do is so important that we call them heroes for doing their jobs, why don’t we pay them accordingly?
How do you assign a monetary value to what people contribute versus what they do?
My good friend, Robert J. Sawyer, wrote an awesome book, a few years ago called, “Hominids“. In it, he describes a parallel world to our own, where Neanderthals rose to be the dominant hominid on the planet as opposed to us…
