What We Value Versus What We Pay For

Not everything we value makes sense as a product.

We’ve learned to understand value as a factor of price, usefulness, and demand. But what about forms of value that aren’t readily commodified?

During a workshop last week, I was asked to explain the value proposition of this newsletter using the framework I’d just taught.

I don't know for sure, but I suspect they thought I was pulling a ‘do what I say, not what I do.' And truthfully, I was. I teach better strategies than I practice.

That said, I know exactly what this newsletter's value proposition is. It's right there in the tagline: rethink work, business, and leadership for the 21st-century economy. For a newsletter that's often abstract to a fault, the core value proposition is surprisingly straightforward. People who are disillusioned, questioning, or otherwise skeptical about the role of work (and business) in their lives can rely on this newsletter to offer regular interventions to conventional thinking on that topic.

If you are rethinking work, I make getting the ideas and analysis to help you do that faster, cheaper, and (slightly) better organized.

The value proposition is clear and relatively concrete. If you're taking time to read this today, that tells me that you value what this newsletter provides enough to allot a portion of your attention to it. That's no small gesture.

The question is whether value of this sort is something people want to pay for. Or even should pay for. I'll come back to that in a bit.

Value is extremely difficult to define, and price is only one way we express it.

Even though we often speak of personal or social values, we default to thinking of value on the market’s terms—money. We’re encouraged to see everything we do as a speculative financial investment—from the food we eat to the time we spend in meditation to our workouts to higher education. Quality of life is recast as something to be measured like a high-yield savings account.

We might, instead, think of value in terms of love languages. We express value through gifts (i.e., purchases), but we also express it through quality time, words of affirmation, acts of service, or, yes, even physical touch.

There are plenty of things that we value that we don't purchase as commodities. Some we fund with taxes, others are funded by sponsors or donors, and still others are either impossible or unethical to put a price on. And then there are the labors of love, to borrow from Sarah Jaffe, that we either don't pay for at all or expect at poverty-level wages

But even outside these more abstract forms of value, some goods just don't work as products in the market.

For example, many people would cherish a hand-knitted sweater. They'd even be happy to fork over good money for it. The problem is that the actual costs associated with a hand-knitted sweater make a reasonable price out of the budget for all but the wealthy. Labor costs alone might be $300-600 dollars ($15 per hour at 20-40 hours). Hand-knitted items rarely make for good products—so many knitters design and sell patterns instead.

Or, for a far more bleak example, consider the US healthcare system. Instead of viewing basic medical care as a public good, we've chosen to privatize and productize it. The results have not been pretty—and aside from deliberately polarizing rhetoric on the Right, Americans tend to agree on this.

According to Gallup, 59% of those surveyed (as of March 2024) believe that the government should be responsible for ensuring that every American has adequate healthcare coverage. Further, 78% responded that they worried about the availability and affordability of healthcare at least a fair amount (more than half said they worried a great deal). And it's not like turning healthcare into a product has resulted in higher quality care—52% of respondents were dissatisfied with the quality of medical care in the US.

We pay for health insurance not because it's a product with inherent positive value but because it might save us from bankruptcy if we get sick. Or we don't pay for health insurance not because we undervalue our own health but because we simply can't afford it.

What we pay for and what we value are not the same thing.

When an emergency happens, GoFundMe and companies like it offer infrastructure for raising the funds you need for care from family, friends, and strangers. If you know the right people or your story is compelling enough, you might get some of your medical bills paid. But at the end of the day, that desperate people are driven into the arms of a for-profit company making millions of dollars off of an immiserating and bankrupting for-profit healthcare system strains credulity.

Researcher Nora Kenworthy studies medical crowdfunding. Her research, co-authored with Mark Igra, found that nine out of ten GoFundMe campaigns fail to reach their goal. Further, during the five-year period they studied, 16% of GoFundMe campaigns raised nothing at all. They also found that people with higher-income personal networks were more likely to fully fund their campaigns, while people from areas with high levels of uninsured and low-income people were unlikely to receive the financial support they needed.

Kenworthy's research also highlights how the crowdfunding marketplace encourages donors to judge whether or not the person asking for help deserves that help. Unsurprisingly, this “selective deservingness," as she calls it, reproduces existing inequities in healthcare access.

GoFundMe fundraisers are encouraged to package up their anguish and fear into a compelling value proposition. They'll share intimate details, including medical bills and gut-wrenching images of their loved ones, “because they want to appear trustworthy and they want to convince people that their campaigns are not fraudulent," Kenworthy told Slate's Lizzie O'Leary. The campaign becomes a product to be marketed and sold.

While sites like GoFundMe certainly provide a needed service, the problem is that this service is needed at all. People shouldn't have to tell themselves or their stories to avoid bankruptcy. They shouldn't have to rely on algorithms and media hits to get the treatment they need.

Individual donations will never fix the systemic problem.

That brings me back to this newsletter...

...and really the rest of the newsletters that offer premium subscription options.

Listening to Kenworthy, I realized that writing a premium newsletter has more in common with crowdfunding than making and selling a product. I'm crowdfunding my livelihood as a writer, critic, and culture worker.

This newsletter does not make sense as a product. Even though I can rattle off a pretty concrete, maybe even compelling, value proposition, it's just not the kind of thing you pay for. And really, that's the reason I got into this “business" in the first place. I wanted to make work that was valuable even if it couldn't be neatly packaged up and sold for $197.

If you pay for this newsletter, it's because you've decided on some level that this work is worth funding. Even if you upgraded to read the rest of a paywalled article or attend a workshop, you stick around to continue supporting me and the work I produce.

I am grateful for the people who support my ability to work in this way. But I don't lose sleep over the nearly ten thousand people who don't. I'm grateful for them, too.

It's easy to say that people undervalue culture work. If only more people were willing to give up one of their fancy coffees, more of us would be able to make a living at this. But I don't think we undervalue culture work—or care work, or community work, for that matter. There are far too few jobs and far too little funding—but we do value it.

As put it in a recent Note:

The cultural conditioning isn't so much that we undervalue creativity, the conditioning is that we get stuck in monetary value systems that devalue creative labor … Art and creative work have always been mismatched with monetary value systems (and I wouldn't have it otherwise).

That's why things like Substack exist. Cultural production is incredibly valuable on a personal and social level, but a profit-hungry market doesn’t have the means to translate that into a profitable investment. Cultural production doesn’t scale in the way the 21st-century economy requires. So instead, individual culture workers look for other options and find a for-profit, venture-funded company offering an opportunity to mitigate the situation—one $7 subscription at a time.

It's like a GoFundMe for culture work. The labor I do, the quality of my work, the value I create—none of those determine whether or not my livelihood gets funded. This isn't a product; it's my career. You don't decide to upgrade because I've sold you something you need or want. You decide to upgrade because you're willing to chip in to fund this ongoing project.

This isn't a product; it's my career.

As with the US healthcare system, how we fund cultural production is a systemic problem.

Jobs in media are hard to come by—it turns out media companies don't deliver the kind of profit margins investors are looking for. Public and private arts funding exists, but like crowdfunding, getting it is often a matter of your social network rather than talent or public value. Institutions that have historically funded cultural production, such as universities and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, are under attack from forces hostile to them.

We could better fund and support cultural ventures and the workers who power them, but why publicly fund something when it could be used to extract profit in multiple ways? As Kate said a few weeks ago, the creator economy shouldn't exist. Creators should exist—but this fantasy world in which we can piece together a livelihood one $7 subscription at a time shouldn't.

Like medical crowdfunding campaigns, until we can reshape the economy to be more equitable, sustainable, and just, it's better to have some way to fund culture work than not. I'm glad to have the chance to try—even if I believe the system is untenable.

But remember: whether or not you fund my work, I trust that you value it (or you wouldn't have read this far). Whether or not you fund someone else's work or many people's work, the money you spend is not a measure of how much you value the art and culture you enjoy. We can support each other directly—but we can support all of us by demanding better solutions to problems created by the insatiable drive for wealth.