Value, Cost, and Rational Professionalism
March 20, 2011
Last week my Twitter feed brought a message from one of my fans describing that I was the only designer he’d ever encountered who thinks the design profession is about money…and maybe that was why my stuff sucks.
Okay, perhaps “fan” wasn’t the right word. I have a lot of fans like him. They tend to spare no happy hour that might indulge their inclination to share thoughts an opinions on the flawed quality of my character, heritage, ideals, or clearly-sinister motivations. They’re mostly designers after all; qualitative discrimination comes naturally.
In any event I corrected my correspondent, reminding him that I write not about money, but about value. Money is just one appropriate result of trading in values. And that is exactly what a design professional does: we trade sovereign value for sovereign value. On our side we bring to bear our inherently-valuable genius and skill and we preserve and quantify that value by assigning specific costs to it, which our clients freely agree to pay. This is called capitalism and every rational design professional is a capitalist (more on this later).
Though my Twitter fan stated that he had encountered me, he was mistaken (on this point as in other things). I’m assuming he has only ever encountered some of my writings where, lacking whatever capacities were required to understand, he relied on his collectivist ideology to dismiss or ignore the argument for value—as a collectivist must—therefore missing the thesis and arriving at the erroneous conclusion that I argue for money as the goal of design. This is okay, as I don’t write for him. I write for those whose morality allows them to understand and recognize value.
Yes, morality. The argument for value is one entirely linked to that single, objective morality I’ve written about a few times before: the right and recognition of an individual to his/her own life and all that comes from and with it. It is, presumably, in this concept that those lacking either that fundamental moral foundation or a capacity for rational consistency find difficulty.
The morality of value
Anything that has value must have an acknowledged cost; else it has no value at all. What's more, the cost associated with something must be preserved else that thing loses its value. Most importantly, the cost and value must be tied to a measurable, finite resource [1].
Here’s one danger of altruism. Something that is assumed or represented to have no cost also, by definition, has no value. What too many in the collectivist-rich world of design so often fail to grasp is that this ideal describes the destruction of the value of all life. It describes an entirely-evil morality.
This is where our core values and rational capacities are required, and they reveal all. You see, while it is one thing to desire to voluntarily share the value of one’s property, ability, or genius (which can rightly be called “being nice”), it is quite another to insist that the desire for tangible recognition of value is wrong. In the first instance one is actually sharing value, voluntarily, which in itself demonstrates the value of doing so. In the second instance, however, the insistence that in order to be good or moral one must give away one’s property, ability, or genius without any expectation of profit articulates an ethos that can only rationally be supported by the idea that these things are entirely worthless anyway.
Designer Hypocrisy 101:
It’s okay for the people at Apple Inc. to profit from the product of their effort and genius (with the most expensive commercial computers in the world), but not okay for anyone else to do the same.
In short, an expectation of compulsory distribution and/or an assumption that profit is wrong declares that everyone’s property, ability, and genius are worthless. And, therefore, that the free distribution of these things is also worthless. The foundational morality of this ethos is that life and all that it produces is worthless. Have a nice day.
But wait! How can it be that the vast majority of those who hold with this seemingly destructive and evil ideal are—at least in name—design professionals? Do they not also accept a wage? Do they not also accept or even require payment in exchange for their design work? Of course they do, according to their irrational whim. To hold with an altruistic morality, yet to also sometimes behave as if people and property have value is to be irrational. To believe that oneself and one’s own property or genius has value, and yet to ignore or deny the same of others is to be a hypocrite.
In either case, this is what it is to lack integrity; to be self-contradictory.
Being foundational, this sort of hypocrisy and irrationality will be reflected in everything a person does. This very common irrational and hypocritical idiom factors among the primary reasons that the design profession is one where integrity is oft maligned and its clients are so often subject to highly-unprofessional dealings. When members of a profession offer lip service to the idea of integrity and yet have no grasp of what it means, things will go awry.
And what of these costs you speak of?
Cost is both the measure of what was required to create something and the mechanism for articulating or preserving something’s value. In our world, cost is most often directly related (or assumed to be related) to financial cost, though there are other widely-acknowledged expressions of cost (emotional, temporal, physical, etc.).
In order to assign a monetary cost to something you must determine (at least) two things: 1) what was the cost of producing it, and 2) what is the value of its impact on or for others? Here are a couple of examples.
One: Unit PNG Fix
A couple years back my agency created and released a simple script for allowing Microsoft Internet Explorer 6 to render .png format images. Cost to you: $0. Why no required cost? Well, it’s something that in the grand scheme of things has very little value. There are many such png-fix scripts (though ours is much simpler and much lighter than others) so it’s something of a redundant commodity. It addresses a need required by only a diminishing segment of certain websites’ visitors, and—in keeping with its price—we do not offer support for the product.
We do not ignore the value of what we're providing, we simply offer it up as our gift; not because it is worthless, but because we are happy to share some value with our peers. Like others, we enjoy being nice. Yes, it did take some effort (some cost) for us to produce it and for us to offer/host it online, but for this minor cost we do receive the occasional kind mention from developers around the world who find it useful. Because of this and other similar actions, we garner a bit of positive recognition and our brand gains a bit of visibility. The long tail of positive effect gives us something of a minor profit that we find acceptable.
Two: A vital or life-saving drug
The cost of producing a vital drug for the treatment of a life-altering disease might be as high as into the hundreds of $millions or more. And why expend so much cost in the effort to produce such a drug? We need only look to the value of an effective treatment to those who are afflicted; a value also recognized by the families and friends of those so afflicted. When some great effort and investment of huge sums of money results in a pill that works, the drug must logically and morally be assigned a correspondingly-high cost.
This might mean that the drug costs consumers, say, $300 a dose or $9,000 per month. This is a high cost, but it would merely be commensurate with the value it provides. Its value helps to determine the cost, but there are other concerns that must be factored in as well. The company that produced the pill must, of course, recoup its investment of hundreds of $millions or $billions spent in the effort to create it. But recouping costs merely zeroes out accounts…as if the company did nothing of value at all. Having provided immense value, the company should then rightly garner immense profit from the great value that it now provides to those who will receive the effective treatment of their illness.
Your test:
Failure to agree on that last point demonstrates either your irrationality or your immorality. For if you believe that such a drug should be given away for free or at some ridiculously-low cost, you reveal that you hold life, effort, and property to be worthless—revealing you to be immoral. If you believe that the life of those afflicted by illness has great value, but that the company that produced the life-saving drug should not profit accordingly, you reveal that you are irrational and a hypocrite. I hope you fall into neither category.
The cost of rational professionalism in design
If you are a moral, rational design professional and you defend your ideals, it will cost you. Maintaining rational consistency in your evaluations and dealings will garner you the ire of your irrational and immoral friends and colleagues. You will be unfairly criticized or even personally attacked for your fundamentally-rational and moral ideals. I say unfairly because, being irrational, your detractors will require no logical foundation for their criticisms. Being immoral, they will require no recognizably-moral or ethical basis for their criticisms. They’ll have emotion and the immensely-fluid advantage of moral relativism on their side. You won’t stand a chance.
You must note, however, that as a professional this is a cost that you’re required to pay. For professionalism requires ethical constraints; things that can only be upheld by those who recognize the fundamental morality and rational consistency required by those who trade value for value. If one doesn’t recognize the inherent, sovereign value in all things, one cannot support, defend, or work to augment those things for one’s clients (which is, of course, a design professional’s mandate).
I recognize the value of working to maintain rational professionalism. The cost is one I’m more than willing to pay, as it is outweighed many times over by the resultant profit. That profit is multifaceted and spills over into my family and my professional enterprise. So I get nasty notes from “fans” now and then. Big deal. I get far more nice ones from those who read and think through my articles (rather than emoting through them) and work to apply what I voluntarily share, describing the success and satisfaction they’ve enjoyed as a result. The profit is far greater than the cost. And, as a capitalist, I’m okay with that.
Post Script
I found it sadly interesting that when I responded to my Twitter fan that anything that has value has a cost, I received the predictable follow-up question from a couple of other spectators asking, “What then is the cost of love?” Presumably, the question from these folks was meant to stop me short and illustrate the vacuity of my previous statement. They were, of course, mistaken. Rational, moral people who have actually known love understand that love, being the most valuable of all things, rightly has the greatest cost of all things…it costs everything.
* * *
- Notes:
As an aside, this explains why the U.S. dollar is on the verge of collapse; having been removed from the gold standard, it is no longer tied to any measurable, finite resource and instead is limited in quantity only to the whim of political expediency. It is, seemingly, ever expedient to print more and more dollars in order to prop up the illusion that political idiocy has not scared business owners and the general population into economic hibernation. Of course, when political interference abates and people begin to emerge from their wise hibernation, they’ll do so to find the economic landscape scorched due to the foolish, political destruction of the dollar’s value.