When Single Perspectives Value Work

I've been debating adding an "estimated value" field to items in my Agenda for some time now. Originally, I went against this instinct because I thought it was up to the market to decide how much my work is worth. This value can only be accurately found through the wisdom of crowds, as occurs with corporate valuations.¹

We all know the rhetoric that "pigs get slaughtered" in the markets, but what about the market for labor? Clearly, this does not seem to happen in most cases of excessive compensation, largely for the fact that funds or widely held securities have a nature of creating great wealth with less risk of loss than, say, strictly invested income. Thus, we find ourselves exploring particularly the employer–employee relationship, which is in itself an artificial market for work.

While workers have exit rights, this competition traditionally implicates material transaction costs across fronts.² I find many challenges in this dynamic which I don't want to dive into now. Rather, I want to explain the masculinity and dominance framing which originated in my Feb–Apr work.

Markets

To start, I'll explore my approach to taking profit and setting stops. Practically, all trades need defined theses beforehand. I'm extremely used to the technical analyses, but you could have fundamental ones, too.

The fundamental trades are a little nuanced given the past half-century of American capital markets. Briefly, you could sort of hold a quality firm forever and expect Wall St to forever pour enough money in to support their permanent growth. Bonus points and confidence if the firm issued commercial paper which regularly satisfied central bankers’ wet panties.³

More relevantly, technical setups always come with price targets which weigh greatest amongst analysis factors. You win when the price reaches your level, no matter how much money you make. It's the defined percent change which increases your capital, no matter how much you "need" any certain numerical amount of profits.

As Income

As any trader learns quickly, the market never cares about your monthly expenses. It will not perform subject to your idealized timeline. And nothing is set in stone until you close a position.

To expect the market to grant you any defined amount of money is dominant. You act dominant over its complexities, defining what should or needs to happen. It's hard to overstate this: the market does not like being dominated.

We could easily recite some generic examples like currency-pegging nations, but I'll share an experience from the family fund of yesteryear. I set a goal about two years before closing it down—a meaningless origin date because I don't even know when this was for sure. I wanted to make $100,000 as my split on 20% of the gains.

No Difference

By the time I wound down to start the Syndicate, I'd multiplied AUM by 2.5×, just exceeding that much in portfolio value. I made great trades and excelled, putting all my spare time into detailed analysis. But it's your time and activity in the market that creates results each individual trade.

My positions wouldn't move just because of my objectives, and this can crucially become a deadly trading pattern. Far too often I tried forcing trades before starting the fund, thinking I could just push harder into potential setups which might not be that great. This is an easy path to losses fueled by impatience and lacking discipline.

Rather, you can only be masculine in your trades—taking the strongest shot possible and letting it play to its natural conclusion. This end-result reveals how much the market valued your exchange, which becomes the end of the story defined by the masses. I step away with these tendies because the individual can only harvest ripe crop, not overinflate it.

Development

This limitation contrasts starkly with the personal elements of productive labor.² Markets do not provide immediate feedback mechanisms for the vast majority of work, as compared with financial trades of any size. This challenge is compounded by the high thresholds imposed by central organizations defining valuable work in a narrow institutional context.

The fact of the matter is that good work helps everyone. It could be a nugget of inspiration to some random internet user 25 years after your efforts. Or you might design some piece of a grand orchestra which delights millions for decades to come.

But nobody pays admission based on the number of bricks, their individual prices, or how a craftsperson lays them. And only a select few industries deploy mechanisms to deliver consideration for years on end for exceptional past work. Thus we find ourselves ensnared in the bureaucratic boss–subordinate relationship so commonly used to approximate value.

Bad Conflicts

With any non-flat organization structure, the boss always needs to take credit for the team's efforts. They employ the work-product as a means towards "career advancement" up the ladder. Hence the hard reprimands common among those who step out of line and "skip the chain of command"—so arbitrarily constructed so that a select few can deploy a Board's will.

This central control almost requires that consideration diverge from remuneration for workers. It severs the connection between producer and market because your labors get sent off to distant customers, often evaluated by other arms of the org structure. These can be horizontal or vertical differences which disconnect us from the impact efforts create.

Thus we wind up with only a few with the breadth and view to understand how every moving piece comes together. This is fine from an oversight and administrative–study perspective, but it creates manifold problems when this approach manifests in a corporate pay and HR process which impersonally defines everyone's direct value received.

Impersonal Views

These parallel individuals understand the meaning and worth of everyone's collective work in an exclusively dominant view. They lack the nuance and perspective to accurately allocate rewards to the contributors creating their change. And the ones closest to this building process with any political power usurp away rewards by claiming the best work under their name.

This one dominant view creates the disconnect so many feel from their activities. Imagine how you would feel if you just made the collective hundreds of thousands just to receive an Arby’s gift card.⁴ This only happens because one dominant view controls the immediate response of ACH payments, whereas a masculine group could collectively reward stellar results.

There is no one better suited to understand the value and impact of work than the worker themselves. But a perfect understanding takes many years to uncover second-order effects. It wasn’t until the end of 2023 that I realized the importance and exceptional execution of the Investure pitch (which favored form over fundability), when I was packing up for holidays.

Time to Examine

This time to reflect on development value exists because of the complexity manifest in work-products—a difficulty unseen in linear profit/loss trade results. While the latter example gets collectively analyzed with statistics, the former working products cannot be adequately labeled with these impersonal metrics to produce a fair compensation.

My solution has always been to form committees interpreting the value of individual efforts, but then I uncovered the community. Combined with NQG, it is so apparent that the whole market of (representative) users can accurately crowdsource the immediate and potential value of transparent contributions. And thus we get to the idea of estimating work value.

The largest drawback comes from endowing great efforts with outsized consideration. An example that comes to mind relates to a project job where I did the Syndicate via my own efforts at a large sum. This happened privately and through the SCF, with the latter presuming I’d centrally outsource aspects to technical teams in limited aspects.

Benchmarking Effect

But that is why it's an "estimated value" rather than a flat-out dominant quote of worth. Reviewers get a snapshot into what the worker thinks their efforts are, without the grueling task of singularly identifying each and every subtask completed with associated value-guesses. Rather, it's much easier to approximate comprehensive worth totally.⁵

The main point in my mind is that we still need some form of dominance to penetrate the market. For instance, I've left the question of pay and cost open in my own work and proposals from last Sep–Mar. The market response has been crickets, whereby no additional (or any) remuneration flows inbound sans a direct approximate ask getting funds known.

There are great schematic differences here between a dominant prevailing utility reference price compared to one more customized to limited available options. I do not wish to explore these technicalities. Rather, what I've found is that any price at all exemplifies to the purchaser that you understand the particularities a final product needs.

Payroll Tact

This applies directly to the results of labor in that naive observers never see the mistaken paths not taken. It's only with the functioning end product we interact, while a creator may employ extensive wisdom to craft an elegant solution. Consider the story of Picasso in a café, telling a woman his 5-minute napkin doodle was thousands of dollars.

The artist can claim such cost credibly because it takes decades to master certain crafts, leaving only a few experts able to perform hyper-specialized tasks. While this is broader in the scale of an entire economy with billions vying for high value, it remains true. And the financial system should reward this dedicated care, not require defense.

That's the beauty of estimating value: it requires no justification, a timely and boring exercise. It can be shared along with a brief statement of content as needed, and left up to the group to interpret—especially given past output valuations. It is exactly the sort of dominant pricing labor markets lack because of uniform standardized wage controls.