This paper began with a piece of software and a thread. Pull on any line of the code and the whole company came with it: the person who sold the last version, the person who wrote down the complaint, the person who made sure the salaries arrived, the person on the roof in October. Nothing in the chapters since has put the thread back.
We have built our way of paying people on the belief that it can be put back. Somewhere, we suppose, there is a figure for what each of us added, and pay is that figure. It is an understandable belief. It flatters those it favors, and it offers everyone else a reason. But when we went looking for the figure we did not find it. It was not at the top, where it has been searched for hardest. It was not in the salary survey, which turns out to record who is scarce. What we found instead was a gap that grows, year after year, into a difference in what people own and in what their children start with.
FairShare is one answer to what should be done about that. It is built from parts that already exist: published pay, shared profit, companies held in trust, elected councils. What is new is the combination, and one rule at its center. A day of anyone’s work earns the same share of what all the work produced.
It is not a perfect answer. Part Two has tried to say where it costs something, and whom it costs. People who could earn more elsewhere will sometimes go there. A bad year will be felt most by those with the least. And no company has yet run it, so the most important facts about it are still unknown.
What it offers is a different kind of mistake. Every pay system misjudges people, and this one will too. But it will misjudge them by a little, in figures everyone can see, under rules the people affected can vote on. The system we live with now misjudges without limit, and sends the bill to people who never learn where it came from.
A proposal like this one should not simply be believed. It should be tried, carefully, by companies willing to publish what happens, and it should be kept only if it works. Chapter 16 says what failure would look like. If that is what the evidence shows, the idea should be set down without regret and something better looked for.
The question underneath will remain, whatever becomes of this answer. We make things together. We always have. A way of paying people that begins from that fact is within our reach, and it is worth the trouble of finding out whether this is it.