The Value We “Get Out” Of Your Input

When I talk to people about getting paid for their input, they regularly look at me like, “what you talkin’ bout”??? With regards to my favorite topic, #PersonalData, you all know that my priority is ensuring that individuals own all evidence of their contribution to the known world. Data is evidence of your input. Ownership of your data is ownership of the equity that your input is worth.

When I talk about pay equity for individual input to productivity I think the feature film “Get Out” is a great use-case for how payments should work. The production budget was $4,500,000 and it currently has revenues of $175,000,000 and growing. Every person who poured in to the making of the film should be due a bonus structure at the various growth thresholds of the productive entity (film). Paying people up front for work is more of a retainer, and taxing is a disincentive. Payments should only be made after value is identifiable. In this instance the productivity is 38 times the input and growing. So what are the people’s inputs worth? It’s a negotiation that needs to start happening on a reoccurring basis. That’s the future.

This type of equity for input is how the entire economy should work. People’s experience and ideas are the input for every single type of product (like a movie) or service (the process of making a movie) that people create. I’m never saying that the lead contributors aren’t worth more than the following contributors, but the smaller contributors…actors, camera people, writers, janitors are worth something more as productivity scales. Our greatest problem in this interconnected society is that there are too few owners of the productivity. A simple legislative fix is to give people rightful ownership of their input to productivity is the only way to close the inequality gap.

After all, economists like me establish productivity as a measure of inputs. Whomever owns input has a seat at the table of profitability. That’s good capitalism.