We All Read Death of a Salesman, Didn't We?
The star system, where a few people make bank while their success inspires a large number of people to toil for little compensation, is the framework of capitalism.
It’s hard to know exactly what the complaints about Substack, which got a great deal of publicity the last couple of weeks, really are saying. Is it simply a Cancel Culture issue where the platform hosts some viewpoints people don’t like? Is it that Substack presented itself as friendly to a certain sort of left-wing “woke” view, only to turn around and start hosting anti-woke writers? Is it mere jealousy, as legacy media writers discover that some folks on this platform are making more than they do?
I find all those strands of the argument profoundly uninteresting. The interesting argument, to me, is the claim that Substack is some sort of fraud because a few writers are making a lot of money off this platform (much of which is advanced to them by Substack) while most writers are producing content for little compensation. This, it is claimed, is exploitative.
Freddie de Boer, on this platform, set forth what you might call a meta-analysis or psychoanalysis of this argument, focusing on the supply and demand aspects of the issue as a motivating factor for these complaints. There is simply, de Boer points out, an oversupply of highly educated writers taking the standard “woke” positions, while there is significant demand for more contrarian takes. Thus, the contrarians end up getting paid more, because their views are more valued in the marketplace. It’s interesting to see de Boer, a leftist, take this position which Milton Friedman, I am sure, would have agreed with, but the man has a point nonetheless.
But I want to say something else about this. Fundamentally, “a lot of people working really really hard, for low pay, inspired by the dream that they can be one of the very few who score big” is not just the story of Substack- it’s the story of capitalism. Indeed, it’s a basic premise of capitalism, and in many ways the reason why capitalism is such a brutally productive economic system.
Let’s take a step back for a bit of economic theory. The basic reason that command economies like Communism are less productive than capitalism is because of compulsion. People who are compelled to do undercompensated or uncompensated work respond by doing the minimum possible. This is very much common sense. Whereas people who believe they are to receive compensation for work have an incentive to work harder. So people will, all other things being equal, work harder in a capitalist system than in a command economy.
Here’s the thing, though. Notice how I phrased it- “people who believe they are to receive compensation”. It’s the belief that incentivizes the work, not the actual compensation. If you live in a command economy, and your overseers are secretly going to reward the worker who produces the most, but you do not know about their plans, you have no reason to work harder. And the converse is true and is a brutal fact about capitalism- you WILL work harder if you THINK you will be rewarded, even if in fact you won’t be.
This is, of course, in a philosophical sense, a form of fraud. But that’s just another way of saying our entire capitalist system is based on fraud. For instance, we hear all those wonderful stories about American small business. But your typical sole proprietor small business involves a person working insanely hard for little money. Why do so many people dream of opening a small business? Because they dream of being one of the few successful businesses, which then grows and allows the proprietor to set their own hours and live a life of leisure. Most small businesses, however, fail, and their owners receive little compensation for their 80 hour work weeks. It’s the belief, not the reality, that incentivizes the work.
Or consider my profession. When a law school graduate goes to work in a big firm, he or she may be expected to work 60 hour weeks, including time on nights and weekends, in order to bill 2,000 hours a year (remember, a significant amount of a lawyer’s time is not billable). Why do law graduates do this? Because there’s a huge bounty at the end of the rainbow for the fairly low percentage who will make partner after several years. It’s the possibility of that bounty, not the reality, that causes so many law graduates to live ruinously stressful lives.
This repeats itself in industry after industry. Entertainment, for instance. There are thousands of struggling actors and actresses in Hollywood, scraping around to meet contacts, going to every casting call, and barely existing on the tips of their restaurant jobs. Why do they live in such awful, contingent conditions? Because a very small number of them will get the break, become famous, and make a ton of money. Or take sports. How many people compromise their educations in the hope of a longshot lottery ticket into professional sports and riches? How many kids get left behind by high school and college athletics programs that ask them to dedicate almost every waking hour to practice, workouts, and competition?
This is how capitalism works. And in fact, one of our greatest left wing playwrights, in his most acclaimed work, which almost everyone reads in high school, set out the entire scam. (As an aside, I would be shocked if any significant number of the people calling Substack a “scam” haven’t read this play.) In “Death of a Salesman”, the titular character, Willy Loman, is a traveling salesman who takes repeated long trips away from his family for very little money- he has to borrow from friends and skimp on any sort of luxuries (even a car radio) to scrape by. This eventually leads him to suicide. We find out during the play that in fact he was inspired by a successful salesman given the obvious name of Dave Singleman, who was so good at his job that the buyers came to him, he could relax in his slippers in the sleeper car of a luxury train (Willy had to put 80,000 miles on his car), and lived a life of prosperity and luxury. Willy thought he could do that if he just worked hard enough and if people liked him.
But, of course, Willy couldn’t do that, and unstated in the play is the number of other salesmen who also ruined their families working long hours on the road chasing that same dream, and how much money the combined sales force generated for the corporation that employed them. This, Miller was stating, was the structure of capitalism- a few people are granted great rewards by the system and the wealthy people it benefits, as a way of holding out a carrot for the great multitudes who will then chase that dream while having no realistic chance of attaining it. And this, in turn produces the great wealth of the American economy, which does not get equitably shared. Miller, it might not surprise you, was a socialist.
De Boer, in his essay, unwittingly invokes “Salesman” when he points out that he got his Substack deal despite being a somewhat unpopular figure in the media: “The question they ask about me is often ‘how did a guy nobody likes get published everywhere,’ betraying the assumption that being well-liked should be the only criterion for getting published.” These unnamed people de Boer refers to are of course repeating the credo of Willy Loman, who tells everyone who will listen in the play that the secret to success in America is to be “well liked”. Miller, of course, thinks that is a load of crap- most pointedly when Willy’s more successful friend Charley says to Willy “Who liked J.P. Morgan? Was he impressive ? In a Turkish bath he'd look like a butcher. But with his pockets on he was very well liked.” Being well-liked is meaningless. As Charley also says, “The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell. And the funny thing is that you're a salesman, and you don't know that.” Freddie de Boer has a saleable product; the people who are criticizing Substack include many people who have a less saleable one.
The point of this is that Substack is only committing fraud in the same way our entire economic system commits “fraud”. It is this “fraud” that actually powers our economy and generates our national wealth and gross domestic product. Substack is nothing more than a synecdoche for capitalism writ large. It’s the way things work, and the way things have to work. Complaining about it isn’t going to change capitalism, because the fraud that powers our economic growth can never actually be called out and snuffed out. We’d have far less abundance without it.