Whatever You Ask For, Part 9: Your Worth Was Never Your Cleverness
For a few centuries, thinking well was scarce and therefore valuable. That was an accident of supply. The popular replacements make the same mistake in a different costume.
This is Part 9 of Whatever You Ask For, a series on machines that grant wishes exactly as worded, and the wording that remains ours.
When a Computer Was a Person
In 1943, a high school mathematics teacher in Farmville, Virginia named Dorothy Vaughan took a job that more than doubled her salary. The job title was computer.
The word meant what it says. A computer was a person who computed, and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the agency that would later become NASA, hired hundreds of them at its Langley laboratory in Virginia beginning in 1935. They worked through the arithmetic that aeronautical research generates in enormous quantities: wind tunnel data, pressure readings, flight test results, the numerical guts of understanding how air behaves around a wing. The practice was older than that. In the late nineteenth century, women employed as computers at the Harvard College Observatory worked through photographic plates of the night sky and produced classifications that remain foundational to astronomy.
Two things about that work are usually reported separately and belong together.
The first is that it was regarded as low-skilled. The historian Mar Hicks has pointed out that these pre-electronic computation jobs were feminized precisely because they were seen as rote and de-skilled, and that this perception was wrong. A great deal of the work required substantial mathematical training. The pay and the prestige tracked the perception, not the requirement.
The second is that it could be brutally grinding. Paul Ceruzzi, who wrote a history of the field, describes the reality of sitting eight hours a day working the same equation over and over, and calls it what it was, which is mind-numbing.
Picture the room. Rows of desks, mechanical calculating machines, and the paper tape coming off the instruments that measured air pressure in the tunnels, to be read and turned into usable numbers by hand. A photograph from 1955 shows one of the Langley computers, Doris Baron, working with such a tape. There were hundreds of them, and the work went on all day, and an engineer somewhere down the corridor was waiting for the result.
Vaughan, because of Virginia’s segregation laws, was assigned to a unit called West Area Computing, staffed entirely by Black women and kept physically separate from the rest of the laboratory. In 1949 she was made its head, becoming Langley’s first Black manager. She held that position until 1958.
Hold that picture, because the interesting part of her story comes later, and it comes after the skill that defined the job stopped being scarce.
An Accident of Supply
Here is a claim that sounds obvious and is not: being good at thinking is valuable.
It sounds obvious because you have lived your whole life inside an arrangement that prices it highly. Schools sort children by it. Employers screen for it. Enormous industries exist to certify it, and a substantial part of how educated people feel about themselves is a running internal assessment of how well they are doing at it relative to others.
That arrangement is not old, and it is not universal.
For most of human history and in most human societies, standing and self-worth were anchored somewhere else entirely. In lineage and blood. In land. In physical courage. In piety. In craft skill of the hand rather than the head. In the number of children who survived, in age and the authority that came with it, in the ability to feed people. Someone in any of those arrangements would have found it strange that a society might organize its whole sense of human value around how quickly a person can manipulate abstractions.
Notice how thoroughly those older anchors have vanished from the way educated people talk about themselves. Nobody at a dinner party mentions their lineage as a source of personal worth, and if they did, everyone would find it embarrassing and slightly comic. Physical courage retains some prestige but no longer determines standing. Piety is a private matter. Yet each of these was, in its time and place, as obvious and as unquestioned as intelligence is now, and each felt to the people inside it like a fact about what human beings are for rather than a local convention. That is the thing to hold onto: not that they were wrong and we are right, but that they did not experience their anchor as an anchor. They experienced it as reality.
The word for the arrangement we live in is younger than most of the people using it. Michael Young, a British sociologist, coined meritocracy in a 1958 book called The Rise of the Meritocracy, which was not a policy proposal but a satire. It is a dystopia, written in the voice of a historian looking back from the year 2033 at how a society came to sort itself by merit, which the book defines as intelligence plus effort, and what that sorting did to everyone on the wrong side of it. Young meant the word as a warning. In 2001 he published a piece in the Guardian expressing his dismay at watching it become a compliment.
Whatever you think of Young’s politics, the etymology makes a point that is hard to get around. The idea that human worth tracks cognitive ability is recent enough that we can name the man who named it, and he named it in order to object to it.
Which means it is contingent. It arose from a specific set of conditions: mass literacy, printing, examinations, credentials as a sorting mechanism, an economy that paid well for symbol manipulation. Those conditions made a particular ability scarce and valuable at the same time, and a society emerged that treated the resulting hierarchy as though it were a fact about human beings rather than a fact about supply.
If your sense of your own worth is anchored to your intelligence, that is not because you discovered something true about people. It is because you were born into a period that priced this particular scarcity very highly, and you absorbed the price as though it were a value.
Prices change when supply changes.
