WHO SERVES ALL GETS PAID BY NONE

I. The Sentence

There is a sentence so obviously true that no one says it aloud: whoever does something for everyone gets paid by no one.

Not by few. By no one.

For payment requires a contract: someone delivers, someone pays. But when the benefit accrues to everyone — everyone alive today and everyone yet to come — there is no contracting party. The public is not a legal person. It signs no contracts. It transfers no money. It has no office and no contact person. It benefits — and stays silent.

This is not a moral failure. It is a structural problem. And it is the central problem of any society that claims to promote innovation, research, and the common good.

II. The Anatomy of the Public Good

What everyone can use, no one can sell. This is the basic rule of the commons, and it is as old as the first pasture on which every farmer's cattle grazed.

Economists define it through two properties: non-excludability and non-rivalry. Whoever uses it does not prevent others from using it. And whoever created it cannot exclude others from it.

That sounds like a blessing. It is a curse.

For if I cannot exclude anyone, I cannot send anyone a bill. And if no one receives a bill, no one pays. Economists call this the free rider problem. It sounds like a technical detail. It is the description of a civilisation that cannot compensate its most important achievements.

Think of the air. Everyone breathes it, no one pays for it. That is as it should be. But whoever keeps the air clean — whoever develops the filter, invents the technology, fights against the polluters — faces the problem: their work benefits everyone, but no one commissioned it. So they are paid by no one. Or they are paid from tax revenues, which means: poorly, late, on a fixed term, and with the constant threat that the next government will cut the post.

III. The Inventor

Let us take the hardest case: the inventor.

Not the inventor of an app that serves a need that did not exist yesterday. But the inventor of a fundamental process — a new manufacturing principle, a new machine concept, a new way of working material.

This inventor creates something that — if it works — can transform an entire industry. Not tomorrow. In thirty years. Perhaps in forty. For the world is not ready. The machines do not yet exist. The skilled workers are not trained. Industry has sunk its investments into the existing technology and has no interest in writing it off.

The inventor files a patent. He discloses everything — the law demands it. He receives twenty years of protection. During these twenty years, he tries to find licensees, convince partners, win investors. Some show interest. Few invest. Most wait and see.

Then the patent expires. The technology is now free. And precisely now — thirty, forty years after the invention — the world is finally ready. Others step in. They develop further, file their own patents, build their business on the inventor's foundation. And the inventor? He laid the foundation on which others build houses. But he owns none of them.

He did something for everyone. He gets paid by no one.

IV. The Researcher

The basic researcher is the inventor's twin — with one crucial difference: he gave up on being paid from the start.

Basic research is, by definition, the production of public goods. The researcher publishes so that others can build on his results. He discloses, shares, discusses. He receives no money for this — he receives reputation. His name appears on the paper. He is cited, invited, sometimes even famous. But the economic exploitation of his insight happens elsewhere, by others who file patents, develop products, found companies.

That sounds like a functioning system: society pays the researcher through taxes, the researcher produces knowledge, industry exploits it. Everyone benefits.

In theory. In practice, the basic researcher is the worst-paid person in the entire value chain. The doctoral student who works for years on a problem and writes the paper that enables the breakthrough earns less than the product manager who, ten years later, markets a feature based on his result. The professor who spent three decades building a field earns a fraction of what the consultant earns who pours his knowledge into a PowerPoint presentation.

And here too: the more fundamental the achievement, the more invisible it becomes. Whoever invents a concrete product may still be named. Whoever laid the theoretical foundation on which a hundred products rest disappears into the noise of citation indices.

V. The Programmer

The open-source movement is the most recent and perhaps purest example of the paradox.

A programmer writes a library. He puts it online for free — under a licence that permits anyone to use it, modify it, distribute it. Companies build their products on it. Billion-dollar platforms run on code that a single individual or a small group wrote in their spare time.

And the programmer? He gets a star on GitHub. Sometimes a coffee via a donation platform. Sometimes a job at a company that uses his code — but then he is paid to write new code, not for the code that laid the foundation.

The result is grotesque. In 2021, a security vulnerability in Log4j — a Java library embedded in practically every major software application in the world — broke the internet. Billions of dollars of infrastructure depended on a piece of software maintained by a handful of volunteers, unpaid, in their spare time. When the vulnerability was discovered, the world expected those same volunteers to fix it — immediately, free of charge, under pressure.

They had done something for everyone. They were paid by no one. And when it burned, they were suddenly responsible.

VI. The Nurse, the Teacher, the Fire Brigade

One need not stay in the realm of technology to recognise the pattern.

The nurse who works night shifts so that the sick are cared for. The teacher who educates thirty children and ensures that the next generation can read, calculate, and think. The firefighter who runs into burning buildings. The social worker who handles the cases no one wants to see.

They all do something for everyone. And they are all poorly paid — systematically, chronically, everywhere. Not because anyone is evil, but because the mechanism is missing. Their work generates no private profit that could be captured. It generates public benefit that appears in no balance sheet.

The investment banker who sells financial products that taxpayers must ultimately rescue earns fifty times as much. Not because her work is fifty times more useful — obviously the opposite is true — but because she generates a private profit that can be captured in a contract. She does something for few. And those few pay her.

This is market logic in a nutshell: the market pays for private goods. Public goods are its blind spot.

VII. Why the State Fails

The classic answer is: that is what we have the state for. The state corrects market failure. It taxes private profit and uses it to finance the public good. It builds roads, operates schools, pays researchers, protects inventors.

In theory.

In practice, the state itself is a poor contracting partner for those who create public goods. Research funding is time-limited, bureaucratic, and politically capricious. What one government funds, the next cuts. What one agency approves, the next denies. And the timescales do not match: politics thinks in legislative periods — four years, sometimes five. Innovation thinks in decades.

The state funds what is visible. Big projects, big announcements, big logos on facades. It does not fund what is invisible: the individual inventor who works on an idea for thirty years. The basic researcher whose results will only bear fruit in two generations. The open-source developer whose code carries the digital infrastructure of the world.

And it does not fund what is uncomfortable. For whoever creates something truly new disrupts the existing order. The inventor of a better process threatens those who earn from the old one. The researcher who finds an uncomfortable truth threatens those who profit from the comfortable lie. The state that ought to support these disruptors is the same state that is financed by the disrupted.

VIII. The Inverted Pyramid

There is an image that captures the absurdity.

Imagine a pyramid. At the bottom lies the foundation: basic research, fundamental inventions, infrastructure — the public good on which everything else is built. Above it, applied research, development, improvement. Above that, products, services, business models. At the very top, marketing, branding, financial products.

Now imagine the compensation. It is inversely proportional to usefulness. At the very bottom, at the foundation that carries everything: almost nothing. At the very top, at the marketing that sits on top of everything else: everything.

The inventor of the process gets nothing. The engineer who develops it further gets a salary. The manager who sells it gets a bonus. The investor who finances it gets the lion's share. And the consultant who gives a presentation about it earns more per hour than the inventor does per month.

The pyramid stands on its head. And no one finds it strange.

IX. What Is Not Paid For Ceases to Exist

The consequence of this paradox is not abstract. It is concrete, measurable, and destructive.

Where basic research is not paid for, there is less basic research. For decades, the share of public research funding devoted to basic research has been declining in nearly all industrialised countries. Companies invest in applied research — in things that will turn a profit in three years. The questions that will only become relevant in thirty years are no longer being asked.

Where inventors are not compensated, there are fewer inventors. Not because people are less creative, but because the clever ones among them see what happens: you invest your life in an idea, and in the end everyone profits except you. Anyone in their right mind becomes a consultant.

Where teachers, carers, and firefighters are poorly paid, there are fewer of them. Across Europe, there are shortages of teachers, nurses, paramedics. Not because no one wants to do this work, but because society signals through its pay what it considers important — and work for everyone apparently does not qualify.

The public good does not die from an attack. It dies from neglect. It dies because no one pays for it.

X. Not a Conclusion, but an Open Question

It would be nice to end this essay with a solution. With a model that resolves the contradiction. With a mechanism that pays those who work for everyone.

But I have no solution. And I distrust anyone who claims to have one. For the problem is not technical. It is not that we have not yet found the right algorithm. The problem is structural: an economic order built on private contracts cannot compensate public goods without contradicting itself.

What I can offer is the naming. That the sentence — whoever does something for everyone gets paid by no one — is not a proverb and not a calendar page, but the precise description of a design flaw. Not a flaw of the people, but a flaw of the system that people have built for themselves.

And perhaps naming it is the first step. For as long as we pretend that it is bad luck when an inventor goes empty-handed, or fate when carers are poor, or regrettable when open-source developers hold together the world's digital infrastructure in their spare time — for that long, we can wash our hands of it.

But if we name it for what it is — a system failure, not an individual failure — then we would have to act.

Whether we do is written on another page. One that no one has written yet.