“That’s the reason they’re called lessons,’ the Gryphon remarked: ‘because they lessen from day to day.”

― Lewis Carroll, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland & Through the Looking-Glass

My first reaction was incredulity and then a certain measure of indignation, but I thought about it for a bit and realised there really wasn’t that much to be surprised or indignant about. One of my closest friends has just been admitted to a graduate degree in journalism at Columbia for which the fees are about $53,000 for the year, and when my girlfriend graduates from Wharton she will be roughly $200,000 in debt. In both these cases, their personal valuation of the degree has more to do with networking opportunities and job-market signals than pure academic content. So if the internship does offer a college graduate a realistic chance to secure a job, it’s arguably less time consuming than doing a Masters degree, and less costly. Also $26,000 is the current bid and therefore represents how much the bidder values the opportunity, which implies that there’s someone out there who believes the opportunity is worth that much (or for whom $26,000 is not a lot of money). Plus, the proceeds go to charity. So, win-win? What of meritocracy? It could be argued that the majority of US citizens (they can’t arrange visas) or people who can legally work in the US, who would want to do this internship could arrange $26,000 if they thought it was worth it. And of course this is not the only, or indeed most assured route to a job with the UN, so why do I find it troubling?

At the root of it for me, is how we relate to work and what work means to us. An internship, unlike a college degree is a form of paid or unpaid work much like an apprenticeship used to be. It is an initiation and training in a craft, a period when you acquire a skill and if you are lucky a joy and fascination for the job. It is possible that the fact that this internship opportunity is being promoted as a means to get a foot in the door, merely suggests that the job itself is fairly tedious and uninspiring. All internships, and increasingly many degrees are “a foot in the door” or in this job market “a toe” or “a nail.” But equally for most of us, a job is a means to an end. One would have thought that today, more than ever in human history it is possible to get paid to do something that you love doing, whatever that activity is. It’s hard to disagree with Alan Watts on that point, even if you find the rest of his philosophy a bit hard to swallow. Although it is a moot point that we have no idea whether famous writers, poets and artists who had non-poetic day jobs loved or hated these.

It seems odd, that for all our technological advancement, a majority of us are engaged in daily activities that in themselves give us little or no pleasure, and that this is considered normal. Ironically, many of those who have a genuine love of their craft, artisans, weavers and craftsmen who have been handed down their skills, are encouraging their children to find more conventional jobs, because their way of life is dying.  And if the role of economics is to find ways to maximise human welfare and happiness, we do seem to be going about it in a strange way. I’ll end with a quote from Primo Levi, one of my favourite authors, who writes about the love of labour in his inimitable and extraordinarily uplifting way.

“If we except those miraculous and isolated moments fate can bestow on a man, loving your work (unfortunately, the privilege of a few) represents the best, most concrete approximation of happiness on earth. But this is a truth not many know. This boundless region, the region of le boulot, the job, il rusco – of daily work, in other words – is less known that the Antarctic, and through a sad and mysterious phenomenon it happens that the people who talk most, and loudest, about it are the very ones who have never travelled through it. To exalt labour, in official ceremonies an insidious rhetoric is displayed, based on the consideration that a eulogy or a medal costs much less than a pay raise, and they are also more fruitful. There also exists a rhetoric on the opposite side, however not cynical but profoundly stupid, which tends to denigrate labour, to depict it as base, as if labour, our own or others’, were something we could do without, not only in Utopia, but here, today; as if anyone who knows how to work were, by definition, a servant, and as if, on the contrary, someone who doesn’t know how to work, or knows little, or doesn’t want to, were for that very reason a free man. It is sadly true that many jobs are not loveable, but it is harmful to come onto the field charges with preconceived hatred. He who does this sentences himself, for life, to hating not only work, but also himself and the world.”
 – Primo Levi, The Wrench, Translated by William Weaver