Trade and Status

In 19^th Century England traditional aristocratic norms are giving way to commercial culture. Anthony Gloster, a self-made shipping millionaire, dying, to his son:

Harrer an’ Trinity College! I ought to ha’ sent you to sea -
But I stood you an education, an’ what have you done for me?
The things I knew was proper you wouldn’t thank me to give,
And the things I knew was rotten you said was the way to live.
For you muddled with books and pictures, an’ china an’ etchin’s an’ fans.
And your rooms at college was beastly - more like a whore’s than a man’s;
...
So he gets three ‘undred thousand, in trust and the interest paid.
I wouldn’t give it you, Dickie - you see, I made it in trade. 

(Rudyard Kipling, “The Mary Gloster”¹)

To the aristocratic culture that Dickie has imitated — on his father’s money — income earned in trade is not entirely respectable, lower status than inherited income, ideally from land. That attitude echoes the medieval concept of derogance, the debasement of noble status by any activity aimed at making money, especially trade. The idea that engaging in trade lowers status seemed odd to me until I started thinking about ways that it fits, in some but not all contexts, my own feelings and behavior and that of other moderns.

One of my hobbies is historical recreation, mostly medieval. I typically teach about fifteen classes at the Pennsic War, an annual two week event with about ten thousand people attending. I cannot charge for teaching them and do not want to but I could charge for handouts; many teachers do. I don’t. Part of the hobby, for me, is making medieval jewels. Mostly I give them to my wife and daughter, very occasionally to other people. I do lapidary work, cut semi-precious stones for the fun of it, donate them to other people in the hobby for making medieval jewels based on surviving originals. I don’t charge for them either.

Part of the reason I do not charge for handouts, jewels, or gemstones is that at this point in my life I am sufficiently well off that the amounts I could charge would be too little to really matter, but that is not the main reason — I still pay attention to prices in a restaurant or grocery store. The main reason is that it feels wrong. Interrogating my intuition, for me as for the medieval noble to work for someone else for pay is to be a sort of a servant; servants are lower status than those they serve. Giving away valuable things, on the other hand, signals that the giver is rich, important, generous. High status.

I started thinking of it in the medieval context but it is not limited to that. I considered offering a paid option for this Substack, didn’t. Part of the reason was worry that the existence of the paid option would cost me subscribers even if the free option remained, even if the paid got nothing extra. But that was not all of the reason. Almost all my writing, both two books about my medieval hobby and six about economics, law, and related matters are available as free downloads from my web page, most also from Amazon in deliberately low priced print and Kindle. My usual explanation, to myself and others, is that I write to spread ideas not as a source of income. That is true but not, on the basis of introspection, the whole truth. Giving things away feels good.

On The Other Hand

One reason I considered setting up a paid alternative for this Substack was as evidence for myself of the value of my work to others; I would be delighted to discover that I could support myself at least at a modest level with two hours a day of writing.

Many years ago I noticed that being paid to give a speech felt better than being paid to be a professor even though it was much less money. My payment for a speech was by people who wanted to hear it. My pay as a professor was decided by administrators, only indirectly by the students who were the consumers of what I was producing. It felt to my intuition less real, less something I deserved. I got the same pleasure out of collecting royalties when my books were first published. A friend and fellow professor who was also a serious gambler, a card counter at blackjack, told me that the money he got the most pleasure from was money he won from other players in open combat.

I conclude that for me, perhaps for many others, being paid for something cuts both ways. Working for hire makes you feel like a servant, a status inferior to boss or customer. Being paid makes you feel rewarded for your work, evidence that you are a productive individual paying for the space you take up in the world. For people who are paid spectacularly for their talents, sports or film stars or billionaire entrepreneurs, money is status, but not for those who have to work for their daily bread. The lowest status job in many societies is prostitute, its label applied to anyone doing something for money that he shouldn’t be, but even for a prostitute, being impressive enough can reverse the effect.

“Pray good people be civil, I am the Protestant whore” (Nell Gwynn, mistress of Charles II, to a mob attacking her coach in the belief that it contained the Catholic Louise de Keroualle.)

Tipping

The nominal function of the custom of tipping is to reward a waiter or cab driver for doing a good job. An alternative explanation is that it is a way to buy status — of the customer from the server. That helps explain why, for many customers, the minimum tip is ten or fifteen percent, even twenty, not zero; they enjoy feeling generous.

When I first read George Orwell’s Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters (well worth reading), I concluded that he was obsessed with class, later realized that the difference was not between our attitudes but our societies. England, for centuries, had a class society in a sense in which America doesn’t. Class was correlated with income but not closely; a sports star might be rich working class, a clergyman poor upper. It correlated, perhaps more closely, with accent. America had richer and poorer but not class.²

Tipping is the norm in the US, much less common in Europe. I think I know why.

European countries are mostly built on the ruins of an aristocratic upper class that lost its power to the middle and working classes. From their point of view, accepting a tip is abandoning that victory, surrendering to the class system they thought they had abandoned.

The Beggar Business

A beggar loses status by begging, the person who gives him money gains it. Seen that way, begging is a useful institution, a way that someone desperately short of cash, perhaps starving, can still have something to sell. It may not be pretty, but it is better than selling organs.

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1. Kipling is my favorite poet, “The Mary Gloster” probably my favorite of his poems, a Browning monologue better than any of Browning’s.

2. Two stories with vivid pictures of the English class system, the latter more positive than the former, are “The Verger” by Somerset Maugham and “An Habitation Enforced” by Kipling.