David Mills: How much is Caitlin Clark worth?

How much is current college superstar and future WNBA superstar Caitlin Clark worth? The WNBA says she's worth (in the arrangement the player's union negotiated) $76,535 her first year and about $338,000 for the first four years of her career.

Is it unfair that's she's not being paid anything like her NBA equivalent, Victor Wembanyama, who will earn $12,768,960 for his first year and over $55 million for his first four years? Is it unfair that she never will be paid anything like he is?

Especially as Caitlin Clark's much more important to her league than Victor Wembanyana is to his. He's not bringing huge numbers of new fans to the game. He stops playing, nothing happens except San Antonio Spurs fans cry for weeks. She stops playing, and a lot of the attention she's brought to women's basketball disappears. Other players depend on her in a way his peers don't depend on him.

The interesting question

So is that $75,535 compared to $12,768,960 fair, right, just? That her first year pay is a tiny, tiny fraction of his? That's the interesting question.

But it's only interesting as a sharp example of a more important question: How much is anyone worth? How does a society decide what all the different contributions to its common life are worth? How does it assign people to different lives by paying such different amounts for their work?

People like Caitlin Clark will be okay. They'll still lead economically secure lives even if they don't live the lives their richer peers live. But a lot of people won't.

How is it right that the hard-working janitor raising a family gets paid minimum wage with poor benefits — one major illness and he and his family wind up on the streets — and has to take up a side gig or two to get by, and the super-lawyer of exiguous morals makes enough to buy a county in Ohio?

It can't be right that the people working with the homeless make almost nothing and the Sackler family of oxycodone infamy remain, even after their disgrace, wealthy beyond the dreams of avarice. (I was today years old when I found that the great English writer Samuel Johnson made up the phrase, not, as I'd always assumed, Shakespeare.)

What about all those who do the work we depend on? Whose work the future depends on? Teachers, for example.

When Clark's pay was the subject of the week, two or three writers I saw complained that Clark was getting "a teacher's salary," as if that were too little for a basketball star but the right amount for a teacher. They hadn't thought about it. They'd just accepted a social hierarchy, and that's revealing in itself.

I'd think the situation should be reversed. The person who forms children's minds and characters should get more than an entertainer, but that's not how our system works.

And nurses, as well as teachers

Or nurses? I've spent a lot of time in the medical system the last decade taking care of very sick people. The nurses who've cared for my friends were generally really good to amazing. The doctors were generally good as well, with a couple really appalling exceptions, but not on average in the same class of care-giver as the nurses. The whole medical system depends on them.

And for some reason, they're not nearly as well paid as they should be. Not "should be" in an abstract sense, but in the sense of what we need to pay them to keep them working. It's a freaking hard job. Better pay isn't the only thing nurses need, but it'll help a lot.

"The nursing shortage will get worse," CriticalCareNurse reports, "because of nurses retiring, nurses experiencing high levels of burnout, nurse recruitment challenges, widening wage gaps among nurse positions, and hospital profit margins." One-third of the three million registered nurses may retire by 2030, the magazine says.

That's with a growing population and an even faster growing population of old people who will need more and more health care of the kind only nurses can provide. Any reader over 55 or 60 should imagine themselves in the hospital or nursing home as their bodies break down the way human bodies do, and depending on one poor nurse dashing from room to room. We "mature" people, to use my doctor's euphemism, need to raise the money and improve the working conditions now, out of pure self interest if nothing else.

I'm slightly baffled that so few people seem concerned about nurses.

Inevitable or correctable?

I've said "it can't be right" to have such disparities in pay. It can't be, of that as a humanist I'm convinced. But is the "can't be" of the "It can't be right that cancer kills children" sort or of the "It can't be right that wealthy people can pay lawyers to get them out of trouble when the rest of us can't" type? Is it inevitable or correctable?

It's both, of course. We have no way of setting wages except through the market, the only mechanism that can efficiently and accurately take into account a job's costs and benefits. A government can't set wages without making a horrible hash of it. The politically connected will get more than they deserve, and the unconnected — the hard-working janitor and the people working with the homeless — will get less.

But we also can't continue to leave so many people so marginalized and vulnerable. It offends a widely shared moral sense that we are our brother's keeper. We can at least raise the minimum wage, increase worker protections, provide more secure medical care, do all sorts of things to help. This will have economic costs, but we can certainly trade some economic efficiency for economic equity. Which will prove in the long run, by making the lives of vulnerable more secure, make for more efficient economy.

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David Mills is the deputy editorial page editor and a columnist for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette: dmills@post-gazette.com. His previous column was "Why is hard-right celebrity Candace Owens speaking at a Catholic conference?".