Editor’s note: This commentary is by Robby Porter, of East Montpelier, a self-employed woodworker and the owner and partner in small scale hydroelectric projects. He is the author of “Doodlebug, A Road Trip Journal.”
[R]ain, wet snow and wind make our internet slow and often take it offline. Years ago, before Consolidated Communications, before Fairpoint, when Verizon was our land line provider, the repairman was bracingly honest with me. “Those old copper lines run through the woods and they are all cracked. Water gets in and raises hell. Verizon will never pay to replace them.” He pulled his cellphone out of his pocket. “No cell service here either. You’re screwed.”
A few days ago, when it was windy and the internet was a bit erratic, I set out to do errands. While I was driving, a song collided with an idea.
On beautiful Sibley Road, not far from my house, the power line poles stretch across a large field. The line of poles is unusually straight because the field is unusually flat, at least for central Vermont, and at the distant end of the field sits the enormous Sibley barn.
If the weather is nice, beyond the Sibley barn, you can see the mountains of Groton and Orange. The straight line of poles and the distant peaks feel slightly western to me, although on this particular day, with the snow blowing ferociously, the mountains were completely obscured.
As I drove down the road looking at poles, I was thinking about the old Glen Campbell song, “Wichita Lineman.” Jimmy Webb wrote the lyrics about Oklahoma and they made Glen Campbell so homesick that he cried when he read them. It’s a tough, lonely job climbing those poles in the wind and snow. While I was contemplating the lineman’s life, I got T-boned by a comment from Ray Dalio.
Ray Dalio is a billionaire who started and ran, until recently, the world’s largest hedge fund. Like many successful money managers, he is an idiosyncratic character with peculiar beliefs both about the functioning of financial markets and human beings.
In his book, “Principles,” Dalio says, “In return, society rewards those who give it what it wants. That is why how much money people have earned is a rough measure of how much they gave society what it wanted.”
I found this comment disturbing and intriguing (and transparently self-serving for a guy who made billions of dollars), but mostly I just forgot about it since that is the default solution for things which are simultaneously disturbing and intriguing. And yet here it was, rudely interrupting my meditation on Glen Campbell.
The thing is, what if Dalio’s comment is correct? It is disturbing to think that, for instance, the Sackler family, who have made billions of dollars by aggressively marketing the addictive painkiller OxyContin, a key accelerant in the opioid crisis, were giving society what it wanted.
By Ray Dailo’s formulation, society doesn’t want phone or electrical service very much. The lineman gets rewarded with more money than a school bus driver but nothing like a tricky pharmaceutical salesman.
But it is intriguing to think of Dalio’s equation reversed. What if the lineman got paid more, a lot more? The extraordinary pay received by guys like Dalio is the result of decisions by society, particularly the very advantageous way long term capital gains are treated by the tax code, but also many other big and small decisions.
If society decided to triple the pay of all lineman this decision would, according to Dailo’s formula, mean that society valued the work of lineman three times as much.
I know someone is apoplectic reading this. “But what about the free market! Competition and the free market have determined the compensation of the lineman and the hedge fund manager.”
Get over yourself. There is a market, but it’s hardly free. Policies encourage some industries and not others. As the financial industry has grown it has sucked national wealth from the hands of millions of workers into the accounts (often offshore and untaxed) of financiers like Dalio.
The market is more like the field I was driving by than it is like the “natural” competition of the trees in the forest beyond. Some years the farmer plants a lot of corn and a little hay, some years a lot of hay. Society chooses to give the lineman a little money and the hedge fund manager a lot of money, and society could choose to change that ratio.
Maybe, ultimately, we can’t choose to give the lineman more money than the hedge fund manager — just as you can’t plant corn year after year — there are limits, but we could definitely pay the lineman a lot more and the Ray Dailos a lot less.
If we valued the lineman more, maybe we would value ourselves more too, and maybe then we would have reliable high speed internet in our rural communities.
