WHAT IS A MAN “WORTH”?

Northern Advocate, 12 June 1937, Page 4

WHAT IS A MAN “WORTH”?

The recent increases in the salaries of British Cabinet Ministers have given rise to interesting discussion of the question: What is a man “worth.” The “Christian Science Monitor, ’'■ in a thoughtful editorial, says that delicate ethical t and economic questions got mixed up in some of the speeches made in the House of Commons when this subject was under review. It holds that whether a Cabinet Minister is “worth” £SOOO a year is a question that has to he considered in terms of cash, though it is to be presumed that some of the merits of a statesman have values not easily assessable in pounds or dollars. The rewards of office, of course, are for the most, part not paid in cash at all. They are received in the form of honour, or ambition satisfied, or in the sense of service freely rendered to the State. A new standard of reckoning, therefore, comes into being. The assessment, then, is likely to be made not in terms of worth but of need. How much does this or that officer of State need to carry out his duties efficiently and without indignity? But it is not only in public work that the value of services depends on factors other than cash worth. It is sometimes suggested that no/ individual eontributes in services more than this or that maximum in pounds or dollars a year. That is obviously not true, for a single idea may be worth untold millions. But it is equally true in fact that big salaries seldom are fixed solely on the basis of the monetary value of services rendered. Nor do we come on perfectly safe ground, as might be supposed, when we consider the wages of the rank and file of the workers. Here at least, comiiients the /‘Monitor,” it will be said the only operative considerations are supply and demand, and remunerative costs of production, “But even that axiom, nowadays, must be questioned. It has already been profoundly modified by labour’s demand for a certain standard of living—a demand which has had the general effect of raising wages all round with the (to some) astonishing result that the higher costs of production have not mined the employers; on the contrary industry as a whole has. tended to gain by higher consumption. ” It is easier,, no doubt, to assess the cash value of a carpenter than a Secretary of State. But the assessment is not something absolute and in the nature of things. Actually, in proportion as the community acquires the habit of thinking in terms of other values, the cash payment tends to go’up. The worth of a man’s labour is likely, in the opinion of the “Monitor,” to be more adequately assessed in cash when it is mot assessed in cash alone.