On the train to San Francisco last week, on the way to my internship, I happened to sit next to a fellow planning student on his way downtown to his job at the EPA. He enjoyed his job but found it frustrating in many ways. The day before, he had toured a former navy base in Southeast San Francisco that is now being redeveloped into a new master planned community by a national corporate homebuilder. In the process, massive amounts of asbestos were being stirred up and it was affecting the local population that was downwind from the toxic dust. He was also working on a project involving infrastructure-deficient indian tribal lands, while volunteering to save a local flea market from being torn down and redeveloped, etc…you get the picture.
The guy has a great heart and is working to do much good in the world. Yet he is overwhelmed by scale of the problems that he is seeking to improve, and I could tell that although his idealism hadn’t diminished, from when I met him three years ago, he had begun to question more and more whether he could actually make a difference or whether the cards were systematically stacked against the types of causes that he championed. In addition, very little money is allocated in our society towards people like him seeking to mitigate for environmental catastrophes.
My second conversation, that day, took place at lunch with a young man in his early 30’s who has been quite successful in real estate finance. Our conversation was animated and he was full of enthusiasm for his job and for future business opportunities that lied in store for him and for his clients. Although he expressed some idealism for the fact that the projects he financed provided for a basic human need (housing), he expressed no remorse for working in the private sector and for being well-compensated for his efforts.
Growing up, I bought into the stereotype that people in the private sector chasing the evil almighty dollar are miserable and unfulfilled as people and that their work was somehow less noble than those saints who worked in non-profits, or were artists, or public servants.
That is a myth. In many ways, business is much easier (albeit less stable) and more fulfilling than government or non-profit work. Easier not in the sense that you work less, but in the sense that the rules of the game are already defined and that customers appreciate the goods and services that you provide them with. In business there is one goal which is to maximize profits. In public interest and in government there are many goals operating simultaneously. The priority of those goals often conflict, in addition to the fact that much of the time what the goals even are is up for debate. Business is a closed system that operates within a particular legal and financial structure. Politics (in any sense of civic engagement) is always up for debate and someone is always left unhappy. By contrast, in business a willing buyer meets a willing seller, they haggle over the terms, they complete the deal, and both walk away happy that they completed the transaction.
We live in a system in which public servants, artists, and those seeking out the public good are in general not rewarded as well as those in the private sector. I don’t know whether this is right or wrong, I just know that it is. People act according to incentives and disencentives. Elementary school teachers and EPA administrators are not going to start being paid tomorrow what they are truly worth, but we should at least come to a realization about what we encourage and discourage in our society. As one of my professors – who had left public sector planning to work for a developer – once wisely said, “Money doesn’t talk, it screams”. I didn’t see the truth in that at the time, but now I do.
