How do we determine value?
In a capitalist society, worth is determined by the market, by mysterious forces like supply and demand.
Capitalism reduces everything to monetary metrics. In such a system, Taylor Swift and Marvel movies are the most valuable because they make record-breaking profits.
In capitalism’s cold calculus, many of the most worthy things are objectively worthless. A conversation with a friend, a sonnet, a sunset: these things can’t be packaged and sold on the market (a poem technically can but it most likely won’t yield much profit).
Does that mean writing a poem is pointless?
Or that we shouldn’t dedicate time to nurturing relationships?
Of course not; the most valuable things are ultimately useless.
In her lovely, lyrical series of vignettes Having and Being Had, poet Eula Biss explores the meaning of value and worth when both are inextricably tied to dollars and cents.
Consider higher education.
What’s its purpose?
Pragmatists believe higher education should teach you marketable skills. A higher education is an investment, the college, a factory that churns out the next wave of workers. In an economic system chiefly concerned with the bottom line, investments of time and money are expected to “pay off.” By this line of reasoning, an education is a “waste” if it doesn’t lead to a real-world career.
Others argue college should promote critical thinking, cultivate curiosity, and create engaged citizens and independent thinkers—its value can’t be captured by a simple equation of inputs and outputs.
Biss belongs to this latter school. When she gets in a cab, the driver, who studied architecture in college but could never find a job in the field, asks her if she thinks it’s wrong to teach something (writing) that won’t lead her students to a career.
Biss responds with a resounding no. In our outcome-obsessed culture, it’s radical to find pleasure in the purposeless. Biss’s pedagogy isn’t about “marketable” skills or building a “stable career,” but about cultivating care, attention, and wonder:
“No, I say…The service I’m doing for my students…is teaching them how to find value in something that isn’t widely valued. And I think it’s a gift to give another person permission to do something worthless.”
In a section fittingly titled “Accounting,” Biss imagines life as a balance sheet, tallied into assets and liabilities. For most people, what she loves most—art, attention, poetry—doesn’t even factor into the equation of what matters.
But perhaps this is why art is so exhilarating. Art frees us, not from labor but from the logic of economics, from the idea that money equates meaning.
Most artists like Vincent Van Gogh and Pablo Picasso create—not for material gain—but for the ecstasy of creation.
We make art for a radical reason: for joy, for delight, for its own sake.
Art asserts “I’m more than my job title/what I do for money.”
Art suggests there’s more to life than accumulating wealth and property.
Art is a space for self-expression, a refuge of quiet contemplation outside the relentless cycle of getting and spending.
Though a painting or a poem can exist in a market, it cannot be completely reduced to a commodity. Perhaps the most valuable things—a flower, a friend—are those that resist calculation entirely. As Biss writes:
“In the final tabulation, what I value—the practice of art, the cultivation of care—doesn’t even appear on the ledger…Art is freeing in this sense, in that it’s unaccountable.”
However, in the church of capitalism, we worship the holy dollar. What makes money = what is valuable.
In such an economic system, how does an artist calculate their worth? Is a film only worthwhile if it smashes box office records? Does a book only have merit if it yields a profit and is a New York Times bestseller? Is a writer only valuable if they have readers?
“A work of art is useless as a flower is useless. A flower blossoms for its own joy. We gain a moment of joy by looking at it,” master of witticisms Oscar Wilde wrote in an iconic 1890 letter, “Of course man may sell the flower, and so make it useful to him, but this has nothing to do with the flower.”
Capitalism insists the beautiful be packaged on an assembly line, pressed into something profitable, and fitted with a price tag. Such a system trains us to appraise things by their usefulness, to ask not what it is but what it earns. But—for Biss—the beauty of art is that it exists outside the realm of utility. Art is transcendent rather than transactional: its value can’t be simplified into neat columns of costs and returns.
In a comic conversation with her sister, Biss acknowledges that her work is “worthless” by capitalistic standards:
“I don’t believe that you think what you do is worthless, my sister says. I don’t. I just mean financially worthless. Writing poetry doesn’t usually produce money, for most people. Free verse is doubly free, in that it is unfettered by meter and it has no market value. I can pass as a writer who is not a poet, and writing sometimes has market value, but it has never paid the rent. The money I earn from writing is unpredictable, more like an occasional windfall than a salary. But I don’t measure the worth of my work in dollars.”
But though her art is technically valueless, it still has unfathomable worth:
“‘The reward of art is not fame or success but intoxication,’ Cyril Connolly writes, ‘And that is why so many bad artists are unable to live without it.’ The value of what I do is that it makes me feel alive, I tell my sister. Even more than alive.”
Under the structures of capitalism, art is inherently subversive. Pondering the imponderable value of art, Biss observes:
“Maybe the value of art, to artists and everyone else, is that it upends other value systems. Art unmakes the world made by work.”
“Nothing,” Chris McCandless once wrote, “is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future.” Yet in our society, success is a 30 year mortgage and stable 9 to 5 career.
Why would anyone relinquish the steadiness of a home, the security of a consistent pay check, the safety net of health insurance for the unpredictable, untethered life of an artist?
But the precariat does exactly that.
The precariat—a social class including temp and gig economy workers, artists and freelancers—is characterized by job insecurity and a lack of traditional benefits. By forgoing the stability of a 9 to 5, artists subvert the status quo. What we call security—they remind us—is a gilded cage, a kind of quiet and desperate prison cell. Our possessions own us. A house isn’t just an appreciating asset—it confines us to one place, demanding we sacrifice our finite lives to its fathomless maintenance. A six figure salary can be a pair of golden hand cuffs, chaining us to a job we despise because we have so many expenses.
And yet the absence of a conventional career—a lack of security—can be a kind of liberation. As Biss writes, artists suggest you can live outside corporate America’s gray cubicles and suburbia’s white picket fences:
“Some people choose their precarity—evidence that precarity is not just a condition of our time, but a response to it. The precariat includes people who have forgone stable employment and retirement savings for temp work and travel and an uncertain future. Their very existence is unsettling, suggesting, as it does, that there might be something worth more than security.”
Biss elegantly explores the tension between love and livelihood. Does commodifying our passions—she wonders—somehow corrupt them? Should we aim to make what we love (our art, our hobbies) our work?
In college, I had a friend who was a studio guitarist in Los Angeles before moving to Berkeley to major in English. Though he always loved music, playing the guitar for money somehow transformed it. When it became his sole source of income, it became work. Strumming solos with famous bands was no longer fun—it was as stale and soul-deadening as stocking shelves at a grocery store.
Decades of research has shown that paying people to do things undermines their intrinsic motivation. A salary signals a task is worth “x” dollar amount—it’s not worth doing without some kind of external reward.
When every person is a personal brand and every hobby is a side hustle, nothing seems beyond the grasp of late stage capitalism’s greedy tentacles. On social media, our ordinary lives are marketed and monetized. Influencers sell their very selfhood, performing an “authentic” personality so they can sell products on TikTok shop and land brand deals. Commerce has colonized our most private moments, infringed upon our most intimate selves.
While Biss argues all work, including the work of making art, deserves to be compensated, she worries that if what she loves (writing) becomes her work (paid employment), she’ll have nothing unquantifiable left in her life:
“Women shouldn’t have to work for nothing, I tell my sister, and neither should artists, but I feel the way some women once felt about the Wages for Housework movement—if I were paid wages for the work of making art, then everything I do would be monetized, everything I do would be subject to the logic of this economy. And if art became my job, I’m afraid that would disturb the universe. I would have nothing unaccountable left in my life, nothing worthless, except my child.”
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