Money and Prestige: The Two Axes of Compensation

(The following observation is mine but not novel as noted at the end of the essay. The text/references came from Kagi's Research Assistant per this specific prompting.)

Compensation has two parts that work like directions on a plane. One direction is money. The other is prestige. Every job pays out along both, but the mix is different for each one. Getting the mix right matters.

Examples abound. A doctor earns good money and high respect. Both directions are strong. A ballet dancer earns little money but receives great admiration. The prestige direction does almost all the work. A soldier may earn modest pay but holds deep honor, especially in moments of sacrifice.

Money and prestige are different goods for different kinds of merit. Paying someone in the wrong way causes problems. A wealthy person does not need more money, generally craving recognition instead. A person who cannot buy groceries does not care about awards, generally needing cash instead. The right reward is the one that addresses what the person actually lacks.

This is an old idea, with concepts going back to at least Aristotle. He saw that honor and money were separate goods. He tied each to a different kind of contribution. He warned that mixing them up causes political trouble, and the five passages below trace his argument.

Concept	Source
Money and prestige are two different currencies of reward. "Honor is the due reward of virtue and beneficence, while need obtains the aid it requires in pecuniary gain" and "not a larger share of the same thing."	Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Chapter 14
They are independent. People compete for them separately. "Civil strife is caused not only by inequality of property but also by inequality of honors." The two motives pull in opposite directions.	Politics, Book II, Chapter 7
"Merit" has more than one dimension. Different contributions count along different axes. "Not all name the same sort of merit." Democracies count free birth. Oligarchies count wealth. Aristocracies count virtue.	Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, Chapter 3
Paying along only one axis gives poor outcomes. "All those who dispute about the forms of constitution assert a part of the just principle." Each group is partly right but wrong when it claims the whole.	Politics, Book III, Chapter 9
The return must match the recipient's need. Wrong mix, wrong outcome. The superior should receive honor. The needy should receive profit. The return must be proportional and "of the appropriate kind."	Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Chapters 13–14

---

Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Chapter 14 is the cleanest statement of the two-axis idea. Aristotle says the return owed is "not a larger share of the same thing." Honor goes to the person who contributes virtue, and money goes to the person in need. He notes that good cities give honor to those who lose money while serving the public, and money to those who need material help.

Politics, Book II, Chapter 7 shows that money and honor are independent goods. Aristotle says equalizing only property fails because people also compete for honors. The two forms of inequality cause conflict for opposite reasons. If they were the same thing, you could not get strife pulling in two directions at once.

Nicomachean Ethics, Book V, Chapter 3 gives the theory. There is no single measure of merit. Different governments count different things as worthy: democracies count freedom, oligarchies count wealth, and aristocracies count virtue. This means the reward space has more than one dimension.

Politics, Book III, Chapter 9 is the political version of the wrong-mix problem. Each group is partly right that its own form of superiority counts. But each is wrong when it claims total power on that single basis. A government that pays along only one axis becomes twisted and unstable.

Nicomachean Ethics, Book VIII, Chapters 13–14 ties it together. The just return must be proportional and of the right kind. You match the type of reward to the type of contribution and the type of need. That is the rule behind the doctor, the dancer, and the soldier: pay each person along the direction that fits what they give and what they lack.

This article's two-axes presentation is not original. Nancy Fraser, in Redistribution or Recognition? (Verso, 2003), proposes a two-dimensional theory of justice in which economic redistribution and cultural recognition are distinct, irreducible axes. Her redistribution and recognition map directly onto the money and prestige axes described here. Douglas Cairns and colleagues, in "Recognition and Redistribution in Aristotle's Account of Stasis" (Polis 39, 2022), explicitly bridge the ancient and modern frameworks by reading Aristotle's analysis of faction through Fraser's lens.

Screen Time extensions are Intermittent Reinforcement

(The following observation/structure is mine but the text/references came from Kagi's Research Assistant per this specific prompting.)

Your child's iPhone or iPad locks. They look up at you. "Can I just have a little more time?"

You say yes. Or maybe no. Next time, you say the opposite. It feels like parenting. It isn't. It is one of the most powerful addiction triggers in psychology, and Apple has built it directly into Screen Time.

Psychologists call it intermittent reinforcement. The concept is simple. When a behavior is rewarded sometimes, but not always, that behavior becomes more persistent, not less. The uncertainty is the point. As one introduction to the subject puts it, "unpredictability can create a stronger association between the behavior and the reward, making it more compelling and often more difficult to extinguish." [1] This is why slot machines work. You keep pulling the lever because this time might be the one. The reward doesn't have to come often. It just has to come sometimes.

Apple's Screen Time feature is marketed as a parental control tool. It lets parents set daily limits on how long a child can use an app or a device. When a child hits that limit, the iPhone or iPad locks. Apple describes what happens next on its own child safety page: the child "can ask parents for more time." [2] CNET, reviewing the feature approvingly, puts it plainly: "your child can send a request for more time if more time is needed." [3] The parent then decides. Yes, no, or no answer at all. The child never knows which it will be.

That uncertainty is not a minor flaw. It is the mechanism. The behavior is using the phone until the limit hits, then sending the request. The reward is more screen time. The schedule is unpredictable. That is a textbook variable-ratio reinforcement schedule. It is the same structure that makes gambling compulsive. [1] The child is not being taught that the phone has limits. The child is being taught that the phone has a lever. Pull it enough times and it pays out. The parent, intending to set a boundary, has instead become the slot machine.

The fix is not complicated. Set the limit. Hold it. Every time. No exceptions. A limit that bends is not a limit. It is a reward on a variable schedule. The parent who always says no to extension requests is not being cruel. They are being consistent. And consistency is the one thing that intermittent reinforcement cannot survive. [1] Your child does not need more time on their phone. They need a parent who means what they say. Do not use time extensions.

References

1. "The Power of Intermittent Reinforcement in Psychology." Unplugged Psych. https://www.unpluggedpsych.com/the-power-of-intermittent-reinforcement-in-psychology/
2. "Child Safety." Apple. https://www.apple.com/child-safety/
3. "Apple's Screen Time Feature Saves Parents from Being the Bad Guy." CNET. https://www.cnet.com/tech/services-and-software/apples-screen-time-feature-saves-parents-from-being-the-bad-guy/

Tinkering on old projects

Over the past year I've dusted off several projects hosted at https://github.com/RhysU/:

RhysU/ar

Autoregressive process modeling tools in header-only C++.

RhysU/ESIO

Parallel-HDF5 library for high-throughput I/O of structured turbulence simulation data.

RhysU/suzerain

Spectral, direct numerical simulation of the compressible Navier-Stokes equations for turbulence research.

RhysU/c99sh

Shebang interpreter that runs single C99, C11, and C++ files with rcfile support.

RhysU/jobserver

Nestable Python jobserver with thread-safe futures, callbacks, and type hints.

RhysU/droll

Command-line implementation of the Dungeon Roll dice game.

RhysU/tuna

Lightweight autotuner that picks the fastest among interchangeable code chunks at runtime.

RhysU/war

Simulation of the card game War.

Underling

Thirteen years ago, while working on the dissertation, I put together a 3D pencil transform library atop FFTW MPI called underling. It looked great in isolation. It never integrated correctly with my dissertation code. I eventually ran away because spending time on it wasn't time spend graduating

In the last couple of days I learned that there was no problem with the library from a correctness perspective. Instead, the mysterious problem was MKL exposes an incomplete FFTW implementation that simply returns NULL for a lot of methods. After some linking tinkering in my dissertation's primary codebase, my little pencil decomposition library snapped right into place.

This is both immensely satisfying (it worked after all!) and frustratingly painful (would have loved to benchmark/publish during the grad school days!). Alas.