ABSTRACT
The great inhumanity of capitalism, the economist Paul Krugman has written, is that it treats labor as a commodity, to be calculated and analyzed as if it were analogous to a bushel of apples. “There would be no excuse for an economic system that treats people like objects,” he continues, “except that, as Churchill said of democracy, capitalism is the worst system known except all those others that have been tried from time to time.”1 In modern economies, the value ascribed to work is linked to its cost as a commodity and the market value of its products. Yet we feel an unease with the idea of work solely as a commodity; work provides a sense of identity and meaning as well as a paycheck. “What do you want to be when you grow up?” we ask our children, associating their careers with their very existence. Both Studs Terkel’s interviews from the early 1970s and recent studies in behavioral economics imply that the value and meaning we find in our labor need not have direct correlation with its financial reward.
