Do You Deserve Your Salary?

A meme periodically resurfaces in social media feeds. It contrasts firefighters, “paid €10 an hour to risk their lives,” with “multibillionaire footballers who kick a ball around.” The device is remarkably effective. It is also factually wrong on three counts, and intellectual honesty requires us to start there.

The €10 is not a salary. It is, in all likelihood, a reference to the hourly allowance paid to volunteer firefighters, set nationally by ministerial order and, since December 1, 2025, amounting to €8.71 for a firefighter and €13.11 for an officer. This payment does not remunerate a job: it compensates a civic commitment that is legally distinct from an employment contract and exempt from income tax and social security contributions. Professional firefighters, by contrast, are local-government employees paid according to a statutory salary scale. As for footballers, none is a multibillionaire in the literal sense. According to press estimates, a handful of the highest earners have reached or approached one billion in cumulative career earnings, which is a different claim.

None of these corrections disposes of the political question raised by the meme: does a footballer earning millions deserve more than a volunteer firefighter?

Two Measures That Were Never Connected

The question, as usually posed, assumes that some mechanism links pay to social usefulness, or ought to, and that we are witnessing its failure. But there has never been such a link. A salary is a price, and a price has never measured usefulness.

This is the old water-and-diamonds paradox, set out by Adam Smith in 1776 and resolved a century later by the marginalist revolution of Jevons, Menger and Walras. What a market prices is not the total usefulness of a class of goods, but the value of an additional unit given its scarcity. The total usefulness of firefighters is immense; that of football is modest. Neither fact tells us anything about the price of the “marginal firefighter” or the “marginal footballer.” The disconnect is not a pathology of the system. It is part of its definition. To fault a salary for failing to measure social usefulness is to fault a thermometer for failing to measure mass.

As an economic explanation, this is sound. It is also an elegant way of avoiding the political dimension of the question. So we must go further.

Three Different Things Hide Behind the Word “Usefulness”

The question bundles together what needs to be kept apart. First, there is the social usefulness of a role: an aggregate value judgment, not a directly observable quantity. Second, there is an individual’s marginal contribution: what changes if there is one more or one fewer person doing that work. Third, there is the ability to capture a share of the surplus: the bargaining power that allows someone to claim part of the value they help produce. These three things vary independently. Much of the confusion comes from treating them as one.

The elite footballer combines the latter two. His talent is difficult to replace and, above all, extraordinarily scalable: the same match can be sold to hundreds of millions of viewers at little additional cost per viewer. This is the superstar effect formalised by Sherwin Rosen in 1981. In markets where many people can consume the same performance and where performers are imperfect substitutes for one another, tiny differences in talent can produce enormous differences in income. An excellent plumber remains a plumber; an excellent singer can become an industry with a worldwide audience.

The firefighter produces considerable value but has little ability to capture it. That value is collective and indivisible, funded through taxation, while demand for the service is determined by public decision rather than by a conventional market. The employer is, in effect, close to a monopsonist: there is essentially one purchaser of emergency services, and that purchaser also sets the pay. The firefighter has little leverage either through scarcity or through bargaining. Nor does the teacher, whose work generates substantial positive benefits that cannot be invoiced: they spread among pupils, employers, families and society as a whole.

The market, then, does not simply reward value created. It rewards value that can be captured under a particular arrangement of property rights and bargaining power. That distinction dissolves the apparent puzzle.

Explaining a Price Is Not the Same as Justifying It

That is the standard explanation. It is robust, which is precisely why it needs to be challenged.

The slippage always occurs at the same point. We move from “the market rewards capturable marginal contribution” to “everyone is paid what they are worth.” That normative leap is illegitimate. Textbook economics can make it almost without noticing, with the confidence of someone describing a law of nature.

There is a serious objection, and it is not peripheral: observed pay differences may owe far more to institutions and power relations than to productivity. Consider the structure of bargaining power and unionisation; the cost effect identified by Baumol and Bowen, which causes labour-intensive services to become relatively more expensive when their productivity cannot rise at the pace of manufacturing, because a carer cannot double the pace of care as a factory can speed up an assembly line; the historical, gendered devaluation of care and protective work; and, at the very top of the income distribution, earnings that may partly reflect rents rather than contribution.

How much weight should we assign to each mechanism? The empirical disagreement is unresolved. The honest answer is that we do not know precisely how much of the gap reflects marginal scarcity and how much reflects the power to capture value. Anyone who claims to know exactly is doing politics in a scholar’s coat. But the question can now be put more clearly. It is not “Why doesn’t pay track usefulness?”, which presupposes a link that does not exist. It is “How much of the pay gap reflects scarcity, and how much reflects capture?” The first is difficult to criticise without also challenging the allocation mechanism itself. The second is an entirely legitimate subject of political contestation.

The Scandal Is Not the Pay Gap. It Is Pay Escaping Its Proper Sphere

Here the real subject begins, and it is not economics.

In Spheres of Justice, Michael Walzer distinguishes monopoly from predominance. That a group controls a good within its own sphere is not necessarily unjust. Tyranny begins when a good crosses the boundary of its sphere and dictates how goods in other spheres are distributed. Money should not buy a degree, a vote, access to healthcare or a place in a nation’s moral hierarchy. Inequality is tolerable when it remains localised.

Yet we have allowed price to cross every boundary. A chain has closed around us without anyone deciding that it should: price becomes economic value, economic value becomes merit, merit becomes social status, and social status becomes personal dignity. The payslip has become our principal certificate of social existence. This is central to Michael Sandel’s argument in The Tyranny of Merit: the market turns differences in pay into differences in perceived merit, producing both the arrogance of winners and the humiliation of losers. The latter are then expected to bear their failure as a moral fault. I have argued elsewhere that this conversion of price into virtue is the central imposture of contemporary meritocratic capitalism.

The problem, then, is not that the footballer earns a hundred times more than the firefighter. It is that we infer that he is worth a hundred times more, and that the firefighter may eventually come to believe it too. The political resentment sweeping through Western democracies is not born simply of income differences, which have always existed. It is born of the claim that income reveals what people are worth.

France Has Already Built a Pay Scale Outside the Market. It Is Called the Civil-Service Salary Grid

Suppose we wanted to correct this. What, in concrete terms, would it take to tie pay, even partly, to social usefulness? Who would set the scale, by what criteria, and how would we resolve a disagreement between two citizens who rank a nurse, a cryptography engineer and a philosophy teacher differently?

The exercise has been attempted. In 2009, the New Economics Foundation published A Bit Rich, applying social-return-on-investment methods to six occupations. It concluded that a hospital cleaner generated roughly £10 of social value for every pound paid, and a childcare worker between £7 and £9.50, while an advertising executive destroyed £11 of value for every pound created. The result is striking, and the method instructive. But the choices that determine whether the figure is positive or negative, and by how much, are choices about scope: what counts as harm, what counts as benefit, over what period, and attributed to whom. The report does not simply measure social usefulness. It formalises a prior moral ranking in the language of accounting. That does not make the exercise worthless. It does reveal the decisive difficulty: every social-usefulness pay scale would have to make such judgments.

France need not look abroad for an example. It has been conducting an experiment on a vast scale for a century. Millions of public employees are paid according to administratively determined grids rather than market prices, by an authority expected to adjudicate the relative standing of different occupations. The result is not a universally accepted conception of justice. It is continual bargaining between professional groups, a struggle for position, and a persistent sense of lost status. No grid can generate the agreement on which its legitimacy depends.

Philippe d’Iribarne offered a key to this French particularity. In France, work is not understood merely as a transaction but as a station: an occupation carrying its own inherited standing. At its summit sits a protected ideal of public service, where one serves something higher without having to sell oneself. In such a culture, pay is never merely a price. It is a rank. That is why the question of whether people deserve their salaries is so explosive in France, and so difficult to settle. The French have, by and large, never accepted the market’s answer, yet have never managed to produce another that commands general legitimacy.

The Scheme Always Breaks at the Same Point

Let us push the idea to its breaking point. Any attempt to tie pay to social usefulness requires an authority capable of ranking people’s working lives. There are only two ways to do it.

One is voting, which turns usefulness into majority popularity. Imagine what would happen to fundamental research, whose returns may take decades to emerge and whose work most voters cannot readily assess, or to occupations serving unpopular minorities. The other is expertise: a bureau of worth, an administration empowered to decree the value of a working life. It is hard to imagine an institution more at odds with what the Republic claims to defend.

Both routes reproduce the market’s failing at precisely the point we hoped to correct. That is the uncomfortable lesson for those who ask the opening question most vehemently. We should retain the price mechanism for what it does well, which is to allocate, and stop expecting it to do what it never will, which is to confer recognition. The remedy is not a usefulness scale but three distinct levers: taxation, which redistributes without claiming to judge; public provision, which removes whole categories of goods from the logic of price; and status, meaning non-monetary recognition, the only fitting response to a problem that is not, at heart, monetary.

A word about the opposite temptation. In Bullshit Jobs, David Graeber suggested reversing the relationship, proposing that a job’s social usefulness varies inversely with its pay. The thesis is appealing, but empirical tests have not confirmed it. A study published in Work, Employment and Society, using representative European data, found that the proportion of employees who considered their work useless was far lower than Graeber had suggested, and declining. Reversing a false hierarchy does not produce a true one. It produces another false hierarchy, more flattering to those who propose it.

Ultimately, No One Deserves Their Salary. And That Is Good News

That leaves the question in the title, and it deserves a frank answer: no. Neither you nor I deserve our salary in the strict moral sense of desert.

We did not choose our cognitive dispositions, our families or the era that made our skills valuable. Rawls was right to treat the distribution of talents as morally arbitrary luck. G. A. Cohen pushed the argument further, describing as a form of blackmail the talented person’s insistence on being paid more lest they produce less. An artificial-intelligence engineer born in 1985 may become wealthy; the same person born in 1300 might have herded goats. The difference is not merit. It is luck of the calendar. The market does not reward virtue. It rewards coincidences between abilities and demand, and there is no moral reason to treat such a coincidence as a title of nobility.

This conclusion is not nihilistic. It is liberating in both directions. It denies winners the right to contempt and relieves losers of the duty to feel ashamed. It makes possible what Sandel calls an ethic of gratitude, not as a matter of politeness, but as a condition for the survival of civic life. A society in which everyone believes they owe everything to themselves is a society in which no one believes they owe anything to anyone else.

So keep the question, but turn it around. Asked of others, “Do you deserve your salary?” is resentment dressed up as inquiry, and we know where that line of thought can lead politically. Asked of oneself, it is an exercise in moral honesty, perhaps one of the few we still have. You do not deserve your salary. You must nevertheless answer for what you do with it. That is a far more demanding proposition.

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References and sources

Arrêté du 17 novembre 2025 fixant le montant de l'indemnité horaire de base des sapeurs-pompiers volontaires, Légifrance, en vigueur au 1er décembre 2025

Adam Smith, Recherches sur la nature et les causes de la richesse des nations, 1776

William Stanley Jevons, Carl Menger, Léon Walras, travaux fondateurs de la révolution marginaliste, 1871-1874

Sherwin Rosen, « The Economics of Superstars », American Economic Review, vol. 71, n° 5, décembre 1981, pages 845-858

William Baumol et William Bowen, Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, 1966

Michael Walzer, Spheres of Justice: A Defense of Pluralism and Equality, 1983

Michael Sandel, The Tyranny of Merit: What's Become of the Common Good?, 2020

John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 1971

G. A. Cohen, Rescuing Justice and Equality, 2008

Philippe d'Iribarne, La Logique de l'honneur. Gestion des entreprises et traditions nationales, 1989

Eilis Lawlor, Helen Kersley et Susan Steed, A Bit Rich: Calculating the Real Value to Society of Different Professions, New Economics Foundation, décembre 2009

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs: A Theory, 2018

Magdalena Soffia, Alex J. Wood et Brendan Burchell, « Alienation Is Not "Bullshit": An Empirical Critique of Graeber's Theory of BS Jobs », Work, Employment and Society, vol. 36, n° 5, 2022, pages 816-840