"If you pay peanuts, you get monkeys"
About this Quote
Cold, blunt, and a little smug, Goldsmith's line weaponizes a punchy rhyme to turn a business choice into a moral law: underpay people and you'll be stuck with incompetence. It works because it sounds like folk wisdom rather than management doctrine. "Peanuts" trivializes wages as pocket change; "monkeys" dehumanizes the workers who accept them. The insult is the point. It gives employers a tidy way to blame outcomes on labor quality while keeping the speaker on the side of "realism."
Goldsmith, a corporate raider-era businessman, is speaking from a world where labor is a line item and performance is a dividend. In that context, the quote reads less like solidarity with workers and more like a warning to fellow bosses: cheap staffing is a false economy. It's a pro-market argument for paying more, but not because workers deserve dignity; because the product, service, or operation will suffer if you treat talent as disposable.
The subtext is transactional to the bone. People become inputs; pay becomes bait; competence becomes a purchasable commodity. There's also a quiet absolution embedded in it: if the work is bad, the employer can say, essentially, "We got what we paid for", as if low wages were an uncontrollable fact rather than a deliberate policy.
Its endurance comes from its cynical efficiency. It flatters the listener's sense of hard-nosed practicality while normalizing a worldview in which respect is inseparable from compensation - and those who take less are fair game for contempt.
Goldsmith, a corporate raider-era businessman, is speaking from a world where labor is a line item and performance is a dividend. In that context, the quote reads less like solidarity with workers and more like a warning to fellow bosses: cheap staffing is a false economy. It's a pro-market argument for paying more, but not because workers deserve dignity; because the product, service, or operation will suffer if you treat talent as disposable.
The subtext is transactional to the bone. People become inputs; pay becomes bait; competence becomes a purchasable commodity. There's also a quiet absolution embedded in it: if the work is bad, the employer can say, essentially, "We got what we paid for", as if low wages were an uncontrollable fact rather than a deliberate policy.
Its endurance comes from its cynical efficiency. It flatters the listener's sense of hard-nosed practicality while normalizing a worldview in which respect is inseparable from compensation - and those who take less are fair game for contempt.
Quote Details
| Topic | Management |
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