Here in the university, we have become used to a common form of argument calling for our replacement via online-only education. It goes something like this: yes, we may concede that early returns on online education are discouraging, but that even if we never get to the same quality of education, a large enough decrease in cost will make it worthwhile to gut the physical university and replace it with online education. Surely, they say, if you can get, say, 75% of the quality for 33% of the price, it’s our moral obligation to take that deal.

Now that’s a particular version of this argument, but it’s important to say that many in our media and pundits level this charge all the time, at all manner of industries. The essentially replaceable nature of many kinds of workers is something of a truism within the market-liberal thinking that represents the largest part of our media class. Why shouldn’t we pay less, even if at some reduction in quality, if we can get away with a major reduction in costs? You can send jobs abroad to China or India, as happened in textiles and manufacturing. Or you can just shed older, higher-salaried workers domestically, knowing that there’s lots of hungry young kids who will do the same work at a fraction of the cost. In a world with a growing division between the health of financial markets and the health of the labor market, the urge to look for a cheaper alternative threatens everybody who earns a decent living. Well, almost everbody.

Now comes word that Ezra Klein, having asked for $10 million dollars in investment money from the Washington Post and been refused, is heading out on his own. Apparently this refusal caused young Ezra a great deal of agita, if rumor is to be believed. Meanwhile, the Washington pundit world is apparently convinced that the Post‘s (and, presumably, Jeff Bezos’s) refusal to invest $10 million dollars in Klein’s venture is a terrible idea. Predictably, DC Twitter is now filled with showy appreciation for Klein and the kind of public well-wishes that are par for this particular course.

Incidentally, you could employ over 160 public school teachers at the median Washington DC teacher salary for $10 million.

I’m sure you can see where I’m going here: how much, really, could it cost to replace what Ezra Klein brings to the Post? I’m not sure what percentage of that $10 million dollar war chest Klein was seeking would actually end up in his pocket, but the total risk to the Post company was the same regardless. What were they going to get for that money? They were going to get Klein’s likability/trustworthiness/presentability/charm, all of which are code words for “cute inoffensive white dude.” They were going to get, I suppose, his contacts and connections, although there’s a chicken-and-the-egg quality to Klein’s internet celebrity and his access. They were also going to get Klein’s team, a no-doubt competent bunch of data crunchers and visualizers. The question, insisted on by the very culture of which Klein is a part, is whether you couldn’t get 80% of the value at, say, 20% of the cost. Could you find some fresh-faced young college graduates to bring the same attractive, unthreatening and avowedly non-ideological form of mildly quantitative news and politics analysis, at a far better click-to-dollars ratio? In this labor market, how could you not? I know a lot of young quants here at Purdue, and they have immense data crunching abilities, and they are hungry, and they wouldn’t ask for much. Some of them even have TV-ready smiles.

Now maybe the answer is that Klein does DC reporting, and that reporting takes access, and access takes the talent for ingratiating oneself that Klein has demonstrated, and not everybody has that ability. Maybe so. But what about more broadly? What about people who do straight-up analysis? Take Matt Yglesias. I don’t know how much Slate pays him; they used to pay Mickey Kaus $80k, a sum Yglesias himself found worthy of levity. Suppose they pay Yglesias in the same ballpark. Don’t you think there’s a recently graduated Harvard philosophy major who could give Slate 80% of the value that Yglesias does for $45k? Does he get that many page views? Or to take it further, don’t you think there’s some bright 22-year old from Mumbai with a broadband connection who could give you most of what Yglesias does for $18k? Yglesias, famously, taught us that different places have different labor conditions and that’s OK. I am only trying to apply logic typical of his work to his own life.

Of course, this line of questioning is a perfect example of the sort of thing that gets me accused of bad behavior. I’m sure it will provoke the usual insistence on my lack of decorum. It is an assault on civility in the way Matt Bruenig describes it: turning a line of analysis usually applied to a faceless mass and applying it to individuals. Well, if you’d like the faceless mass version, simply apply this reasoning to bloggers and writers and pundits writ large. Because if my replaceability as a college teacher is obvious to them, their replaceability is obvious to me. There’s a lot of people online writing the same kind of Breaking Bad recaps for free that the pros get paid to write. They may not be writing them as well as the pros. But 75% of the quality at 0% of the cost sure seems like a deal. And I think that is actually at play in the showy regard for Klein that is bubbling on Twitter today: I think they know that as goes the Wonk King, so goes their livelihood.

This is not a comfortable kind of argument for me to make. It’s not my habit to begrudge anyone their livelihood. I am one of those who thinks that the world does, actually, owe everybody a living. I want more people making a living as writers and thinkers and analysts. If we had a sensible, steeply progressive tax structure that redistributed an appropriate amount of their wages, I wouldn’t have much of a problem with any of these superstar pundits making that much. (To their great credit, both Yglesias and Klein favor higher taxation and more redistribution.) My greatest wish for our domestic policy at the moment is that we institute some kind of guaranteed minimum income so that more people can enjoy the autonomy and intellectual rewards that our professional writers do. And I deeply believe that constantly asserting that some people are overpaid makes working life a relentless drive to the bottom for all but the financiers who capture such an enormous percentage of our wealth. But under the current conditions, I feel compelled to subject the pundit class to the same questions that it is constantly asking of others. But maybe being a pundit means never having to be subjected to the same scrutiny you apply to everyone else.