WHAT IS A MAN WORTH?

Cromwell Argus, Volume LXI, Issue 3162, 11 May 1931, Page 7

WHAT IS A MAN WORTH?

An Interesting Article on Relative Values by a Thoughtful Writer.

Maurice Chevalier, the popular French film actor, appeared in London for two weeks in a revue. For these two weeks' work he was paid £BOOO.

Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd make incomes of £200,000 to £300,000 a year. Are their services to the world really as socially valuable as all that?

Now, I do not want to.be misunderstood. Let me say very plainly that I am not criticising M. Chevalier, Charlie Chaplin, or Harold Lloyd. The sums I have mentioned appear to be their market value;* and when a man sells either his goods, his labor, or his ability he would be a fool to refuse a good price. A man is entitled to get whatever price he can. That is what we mean by market value —the price anything can fetch in the open market. But market value is by no means the same thing as social value —and I am left wondering if we have not all got our ideas of values completely inverted. To earn what Chevalier received in two weeks, 2500 agricultural laborers would have to sweat and toil, day in and day out, for a whole year tilling the soil and growing the food without which none of us could exist for a single day. Charlie Chaplin's earnings in a single year amount to more than the combined wages of something like 3000 miners working day in and day out to dig and hew the coal for furnaces and factories and home without which life simply could not go on. I think you will agree with me that tnere is something here that wants thinking about. Let us look at it in another way. Chaplin and Lloyd each get twenty or thirty times more each year than is paid to the President of the United States. Chevalier, for two weeks' work, is to receive nearly twice as much as the annual salary of the Prime Minister of England. Are we really to assume that this is a correct valuation of the services these various gentlemen render to their fellows?

It is commonplace to-day, I think, that the real master of the world is the scientist. Every one of us is dependent on him for our food, our drink, our clothes, our pleasures, our safety, and even our very lives. Life on this little planet we call the Earth would have been impossible long ago had it not been for the skill and knowledge and selfless devotion of these men and women of science. How do we reward them? We offer them salaries less than the wages we pay to municipal dustmen!

Here is an actual advertisement that appeared only the other day:— Applications are invited for the post of Assistant Research and Advisory Officer in Plant Husbandry. Candidates should possess an Honors Degree in Botany and should have some experience of Plant Pathology. A knowledge of agriculture would be an additional qualification. A long and expensive training has gone to the making of any man or woman who could hope to fill a job like that —and the successful candidate would have to be a very able person. And what is the salary? The salary for this specialist is "£2OO, rising by £lO to £250"! While a scientific specialist can only get £4 a week, a comedian can get £4OOO a week! There is certainly something wrong with us, don't you think? Here is another astonishing instance oi the way we treat skill and knowledge. - When the RIOO recently flew across the Atlantic to Canada her crew received the princely wage of 4d. an hour flying time, for the first twelve nours, and 6d. an hour afterwards. It worked out at £l/17/6 for flying the Atlantic! And for this niggardly sum these men had to risk their lives on a purely experimental flight and perform incredible feats of skill and daring. I remember Sir Harry Lauder once saying: "I get £2OOO a week because l am worth it." No, he got it because he found someone willing to pay it!

No singer of comic songs, however pleasantly and funnily he sings, is really worth as much as a Prime Minister, a judge, or the head of a big business on whose knowledge and judgment depends the daily employment of thousands of people and the satisfying of the needs of thousands more —let alone being worth twenty or thirty times as much. I fancy that by time you wnl, if you think about it, agree with me that we have rather let our sense of value ge out of hand. Compare the real value of the work of a singer with that of an engine-driver who takes his train with its living freight or its urgently needed cargo safely, day after day, to its journey's end. Or with that of the signalman whose unceasing vigilance provides much of the safety. Or the seaman the miner, the engineer, the steel smelter, the builder, or the scavanger.

We could do without comedians and still live; but lot the real workers cease from their labors and who could exist?

I read the other day an astonishing account of what Is needed to produce that commonplace instrument, the telephone—and as you read it, remember that of practically every other ar tide of everyday use the same marvellous story could be told: — It needed a Japanese who prepared the silk in the covering on a cord, a British Indian who mined the mica used within the Instrument, as insulation, a Brazilian —or more likely a Malayan or Sumatran native — who gathered rubber from a tree in forest or plantation, an Trlahmnn

who gathered flax used for the fibre for the paper in the condenser, a Rusßian who, In the Urals, mined the platinum required, an Egyptian who, In the Nile Valley, cultivated cotton, also for the insulation, and a South African, or it may be an Alaskan miner, whose product also the telephone needs. All these workers, each in his separate land, combined with the coal miner to furnish the material which the electricians, engineers, and mechanics form into a telephone. Without the compassing of the whole round globe for materials, the telephone is not and could not be.

That is the essence of real social service and the core of world-wide cooperation. Yet how many of these workers get even barely adequate remuneration? And remember that behind them all is the scientist whose genius alone set all this miracleworking going, who is expected to perform his miracles for a salary at which many a skilled artisan would turn up his nose.

Do you see now what I mean when I say that we have allowed our ideas of monetary value to distort our ideas of social value It is clear that we never bother to ask: "What is a man worth?" We prefer the useless query, "What can a man get?" Yet suppose that on to a desert island we could put, say, a comedian, an agricultural worker, an engineer, a miner, and a scientist. Whose work would then be of most social value? That is about the only way of arriving at a quick conclusion about the true social value of the work people do. We do not pay men, and we never have paid them, in proportion to the work they do in the world. Part of the trouble is, I think, that we take the miracles of life too much for granted; we never give a thought to the labor that goes to making our lives easy and safe and comfortable. If we did we might have some uneasy moments. We do not see the miracle-workers in mine and factory and mill, poring over microscopes in laboratories, or sweating in front of roaring blast furnaces, and so we do not care.. But we ought to care, and some day I think we shall care. We shall pay the men and women most who do the most useful and vital work.