Living the Subsidized Life

In recent years, I have concluded that all my professional life has been subsidized. I don't mean that I'm getting paid. I mean that someone or some organization is actually contributing money to what I am doing, and, consequently, to my livelihood. I have worked at seven non-profit organizations since graduating from college. All of these organizations get some money from people who do not necessarily receive any tangible benefit. People, either as individual contributors or through a corporation or foundation, provide funds to make these things function.

So nothing I do really has made something by itself that people find valuable enough to buy for the price. I'm like the clearance endcap at Target, full of discontinued products sold below cost to clear the shelves. But non-profits have raised money this way for a long time, through private wealth. The assumption was that a public good does not always have a public to pay for it or that can pay for it.

Most of these jobs, being non-profit, do not justify very high wages, which is the second level of subsidy in my life, the cash and in-kind donations of parents, mostly my wife's. They will occasionally give us money, not whole lot: $25, $50 or a few times a couple hundred dollars. They also watch the kids when my wife has to go to work, at least once a week. They have us over for dinner, too.

So am I a blood sucker, draining my host dry while not returning anything? I started to think: who is a net producer? A tree.

In junior high science, we learned about producers and consumers. Producers make their own food, i.e. plants making glucose from light, sun and water. Consumers eat the food of others or just eat the others, whatever is easier and tastier. So, then, are any animals actually producers? Do any of us give more than we take?

Consider Apple, a very profitable company these days. Are they subsidized? They have investors, but that's hardly the same, is it? Unless the investment goes south, in which case they were subsidizing it. Ideally, though, the investment dollars are returned to investors plus more, maybe lots more.

Apple makes computers, monitors, iPods and software. How much is extracted from the earth in order to meet the mineral needs of their hardware? How much copper, lead or mercury? Or the plastics? Is there any way to replace it? If not, that's a net loss? And they are hardly a huge user of metals in their products compared to cars or big appliances.

The earth is subsidizing the profitability of Apple, carrying all the materials necessary to create the iPod or MacBook. But the hardware is just the necessary materials. What makes Apple and, essentially, every company unique is what they do with the materials, what approach they take, how they marry idea with medium to create something of value.

My conclusion: we all live a subsidized life. Some of us are better at using the subsidies provided by the earth and sun, others are better and extracting the refined subsidies of wealth from people. They are all gifts. We are all recipients.