24 September, 11:15
Imagine you were asked to draw up the payroll for a country fighting for its children's right to live, to be happy, prosperous and safe. Not for some abstract state out of an economics textbook, but for a real country, where the birth rate has fallen to a historic low, where missiles fly over its cities every night, and where cases of embezzled public money almost never end in a conviction. Whom would you put at the top of that list?
The answer seems obvious: the people who raise children, shape the way they think, heal them, teach them, and protect them from death and from injustice. Now open the real payroll. It will hardly surprise you that it has been drawn up the other way around.
The usual explanation comes in one of two phrases: "that is how the market works" or "that is standard practice everywhere." Both are lies. Public spending is set not by the market but by officials themselves, and I will come back to that. As for "everywhere," a simple comparison disposes of it.
According to Ukraine's Ministry of Finance, the average salary of an employee of the Ministry of Health is 70,000 hryvnias a month. The average salary of a Ukrainian doctor, according to the National Health Service of Ukraine, the agency that pays for medical care under contracts, is 28,200 hryvnias, with a promise to raise it to 30,000. In other words, the bureaucrat who writes the rules for medicine earns 2.5 times more than the person who actually delivers the benefit.
In Poland, which today has one of the fastest-growing economies in the European Union, a ministry employee earns 15,000 zlotys and a doctor 18,000. In the Czech Republic the gap is sharper still: 43,000 korunas at the ministry against 126,000 for a doctor, almost three times more in the doctor's favour. In Lithuania it is 2,500 euros against 5,900. Put simply, among Ukraine's European neighbours a doctor earns more than the official who manages him. In "European" Ukraine the official earns 2.5 times more than the doctor. The proportion is not merely different. It has been turned on its head.
I do not cite this example as a social-media curiosity. It reveals a pattern that reaches far beyond the Ministry of Health, and describing it takes three formulas. The first must answer what counts as usefulness in the first place. The second shows how that usefulness is paid for. The third explains where the money actually goes, and why.
Not a Ukrainian discovery, but a Ukrainian record
Honesty requires an admission first: the conclusion that society pays least for the work it needs most is not mine. The American anthropologist David Graeber formulated it back in 2013 in his essay "On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs," and in 2018 expanded it into the book "Bullshit Jobs."
His observation was blunt: the more obviously a job benefits other people, the less it tends to pay. Nurses, rubbish collectors and teachers sit at the bottom of the scale; corporate lawyers and consultants in "strategic development" sit at the top. Graeber proposed a simple test. Imagine the profession vanished tomorrow. Without nurses and rubbish collectors a city would grind to a halt almost at once. The disappearance of most office jobs would go unnoticed.
Graeber drew on a study by Britain's New Economics Foundation called "A Bit Rich," published in 2009. Its authors tried to put a monetary value on how much good or harm society gets for every pound paid to a member of a given profession. The results were close to scandalous.
A hospital cleaner, by their estimate, generates more than 10 pounds of social value for every pound she is paid; a recycling worker about 12. A City of London banker, by contrast, destroys about 7 pounds for every pound he earns, an advertising executive about 11, and a tax adviser who helps clients avoid paying tax about 47. The methodology can be disputed, but the direction of the finding matches what we see in the Ukrainian health ministry's payroll.
Economists later tested the intuition more rigorously. Benjamin Lockwood, Charles Nathanson and Glen Weyl, in "Taxation and the Allocation of Talent," published in the Journal of Political Economy in 2017, estimated what economists call the externalities of professions: the benefit or harm a job does to society over and above the salary itself. For researchers and teachers the effect was positive; for the financial sector, negative. Earlier still, in 1991, Kevin Murphy, Andrei Shleifer and Robert Vishny showed where this leads: when redistributing other people's money pays better than creating it, the most talented people go there, and the economy slows down.
All these works describe the symptom. But they were written about market economies, where the distortions arise on their own, out of the way finance and corporations are built. The Ukrainian case is different, because here doctors and officials are paid from one and the same budget, and the payroll is drawn up not by a market but by specific, well-known people. So the explanation must be different too.
Formula one: a ruler for usefulness
To say that someone is paid unfairly, we first have to agree on what we are measuring. Otherwise every argument about pay becomes a tug-of-war between professions, each convinced of its own indispensability.
I propose to measure usefulness from the most obvious starting point. If we put the meaning of life at the centre of the system, then its main result is not what we produced today but what remains after us: the next generation, and the condition in which it enters adult life.
Then the usefulness of any person, regardless of rank or salary, is measured by how far their actual work helps children to be born and grow up, to survive, and to live in a country where the law protects them more strongly than the greed of bureaucrats and self-styled "servants of the people."
From this come three circles around the child.
The first circle gives life and nurtures it. These are parents, nursery teachers, midwives, paediatricians, schoolteachers, school nurses. All of them stand at zero distance from the child; their work touches the child directly, without intermediaries.
The second circle protects that life from physical destruction. In Ukraine today this means first of all police officers, soldiers at the front, border guards, and the air-defence crews who shoot down missiles over residential districts. But not only them. It means the rescuers who dig through the rubble after a strike. The sappers who give people back their fields and yards. The power engineers who repair the grid under shelling so that a flat with a newborn stays warm in winter. The railway workers who evacuated children from under fire. The medics at front-line stabilisation points and the volunteers who cover what the state fails to cover. The result of all these people's work is measured in lives that were not cut short.
The third circle protects people from having what they raised and saved taken away from them. This is the circle of justice, and it is built in a more complicated way than the first two, because it cannot be described as a list of posts. Usefulness here belongs to the function, not the office. A judge who judges honestly stands at the top of the scale. A judge who sells rulings stands at the very bottom, though they share one office, one robe and one salary. The same applies to investigators, prosecutors, auditors, tax inspectors. Beside them work people with no office at all: investigative journalists, activists, lawyers who take on hopeless cases, and whistleblowers who risk everything to carry documents out into the light.
Usefulness within these circles can be measured along three parameters.
The first is directness: how close the work stands to life itself.
The second is horizon: how long the result lasts. A teacher shapes a person for decades; an official's decision lives until the next reorganisation.
The third is irreplaceability, and here Graeber's test applies: how quickly children would feel it if this work disappeared tomorrow. Without a midwife, disaster comes the same day. Without most of the departments of any ministry, no one would notice for years.
Managers have a place in this coordinate system too, but their usefulness is derivative. It exists exactly to the extent that they serve the three circles, and it drops to zero or goes negative once they begin to serve themselves. That is why the words "regardless of status" matter here: an office only gives a person the chance to be useful or harmful. The choice is theirs.
Formula two: the more useful, the less paid
Now lay this ruler against actual incomes, and the picture flips.
Start at the very top. The work of parents raising a child is paid by no one. The New Zealand economist Marilyn Waring showed as early as 1988, in her book "If Women Counted," that the system of national accounts by which GDP is calculated does not count this work at all. The American economist Nancy Folbre developed the same idea in "The Invisible Heart": the economy rests on unpaid care work that it refuses to see.
So the most useful work in the world simply does not exist for state statistics. In 20 years, without this work, there will be no taxpayers, no soldiers and no officials, yet it appears on no payroll.
Go one step down, to nursery teachers, schoolteachers and doctors. They are paid, but at the bottom of the budget scale, just enough to keep the work from stopping altogether. The same 28,200 hryvnias for a doctor against 70,000 for a ministry employee is a textbook illustration of the problem.
Why does this happen?
My answer is this: the system pays not for usefulness as such, but for intermediation.
The benefit of a teacher or a doctor reaches the citizen directly. Between a paediatrician and a child there is no point at which an intermediary can skim off a margin, so the intermediary has no reason to pay well for that work. He pays the minimum and calls it "budget constraints."
And the civic activist turns out to be the logical end of the scale. His benefit reaches citizens in full, with no intermediary, and on top of that it is aimed at whoever sits by the distribution point, because the activist exposes that intermediary. So the scale does not stop at zero. It goes negative. The activist spends his own money and collects lawsuits, threats and attacks. Kateryna Handziuk, an activist from Kherson who spent years speaking publicly about corruption in local government, was doused with sulphuric acid in July 2018 and died in November of the same year. It is the cruellest illustration of the second formula: the greatest benefit to citizens is paid at a negative rate.
The circle of justice is the worst paid of all for one more reason: its usefulness is invisible. An honest auditor, a good judge, a decent journalist who publishes an investigation in time all prevent harm, and prevented harm cannot be shown. Nobody sees the hospital that was not looted or the privatisation that never happened. The better this circle works, the less visible its result, and the easier it is for the system to pretend it does not need it.
So the second formula reads: the more directly a benefit reaches the citizen, and the less of it an intermediary can appropriate, the less it is paid, down to negative pay for those who work against the parasitic intermediary.
Formula three: distance to the till
If the money does not go where the usefulness is, it must be going somewhere else. Where exactly?
On paper the system explains salaries in perfectly respectable terms: position, responsibility, qualifications, length of service. Formally an official's income equals the salary attached to his place in the hierarchy, and the hierarchy supposedly reflects the degree of responsibility. But the first sleight of hand is already hidden here.
Who draws up these pay scales?
The ministries, that is, the people who stand closest to the distribution of money. So even the paper formula is tilted in favour of those who write it. A health ministry employee earns 70,000 not because his responsibility exceeds a surgeon's, but because he drew up the surgeon's pay scale himself.
The mechanism was described long ago. The American economist William Niskanen showed in "Bureaucracy and Representative Government" in 1971 that an official seeks to maximise not the results for citizens but the budget of his own agency, because his status, staff and personal income depend on it. Hence the imbalance: the ministry controls all the money, and the doctor gets what is left, under a formula written for him by someone else.
Look at the judiciary, where this logic is especially plain. According to Ministry of Finance data cited by Okrema Dumka, in June 2026 the average monthly salary of judges in Ukraine's highest judicial bodies ranged from 197,800 to 446,700 hryvnias.
These are the Supreme Court, the Constitutional Court, the High Anti-Corruption Court, and the members of the High Council of Justice and the High Qualification Commission of Judges.
And the figures are rising fast. As sud.ua calculated, the average salary of Supreme Court judges rose in six months from 307,310 hryvnias in January to 446,720 in June. The explanation for the jump is entirely mundane: the law was changed so that a judge's base salary is now calculated solely from the subsistence minimum set in the budget, and the Ministry of Finance estimated the additional cost for 2026 at about 2.7 billion hryvnias. For comparison, over the same six months doctors have merely been promised 30,000.
Precision matters here. A high judicial salary is not in itself a Ukrainian anomaly. Judges in Europe are well paid too, on the principle of independence: a judge should be expensive to buy. The Ukrainian anomaly lies elsewhere. The high salary is paid, yet there is no justice, and a large salary does not stop anyone from taking even larger bribes. Vsevolod Kniazev, the chief justice of the Supreme Court, whom Ukraine's National Anti-Corruption Bureau (NABU) detained in May 2023 in a case involving a 2.7-million-dollar bribe, officially drew one of the highest salaries in the country.
This brings us to the heart of the matter: in reality a second component is added to the paper formula, which I call the rent of access.
Its size is set by the volume of the flow passing through the point where a person sits, and by how freely that person can dispose of the flow without oversight. The American corruption scholar Robert Klitgaard derived the classic formula back in 1988: corruption equals monopoly plus discretion minus accountability.
Build it into our logic, and real income looks like this: official salary plus a share of the flow, which grows together with the monopoly over decisions, the freedom of discretion and impunity.
Hence a paradox familiar to anyone who follows Ukrainian investigations. The richest people in the state system are often not those with the highest salaries at all. Tetiana Krupa, head of the medical and social expert commission in the Khmelnytskyi region, the body that certifies disability, was on paper a modest public employee, yet in 2024 around 6 million dollars in cash was found in her possession. Her income was set not by her salary but by her signature, through which passed decisions on disability, and therefore on military deferrals, pensions and benefits.
Customs, medical commissions, tender managers and permit offices are built the same way. The official salary there may even be lower than a judge's, but real income is set not by the pay grade but by one's position at the till.
The economists Daron Acemoglu and James Robinson, in "Why Nations Fail," call such systems extractive: they are designed not to create wealth but to extract it for the benefit of a narrow circle. In an extractive system people are paid not for their contribution but for their proximity to distribution.
The third formula, then, reads: the closer a person stands to the point where money is distributed, the higher their income.
Where the formulas break, and why that proves them
Any pattern should be tested against its exceptions; otherwise it turns into a conspiracy theory in which everything is explained by a single word.
The first exception: doctors in private practice. A first-rate surgeon or dentist in private practice can earn a great deal, which seems to refute the second formula. But look at where the line runs. When a patient pays a doctor directly, the price of the work and its usefulness converge again. A good specialist is sought after, people queue for appointments, and they pay more. The relationship flips only when the state steps in as an intermediary between a person and whoever is helping them. The inversion, then, arises not in the economy as a whole but precisely where an intermediary gains the right to decide what someone else's work is worth. Remove the intermediary, and the price of work begins to reflect its value once more.
The second exception: the military. Soldiers protect life directly, rank high on the ruler of usefulness, and yet combat pay in Ukraine is markedly higher than a teacher's salary. This is no refutation either. The system starts paying for usefulness when its own survival depends on it. Without an army there will be no ministries, no tills and no distribution points, so here even the intermediary is forced to open his wallet. A teacher poses no such threat to the intermediary: the consequences of underpaying him will arrive in 20 years, when today's distributors are already retired.
In lieu of a conclusion
The 2.5-fold gap between the salary of a health ministry employee and that of a doctor is neither a statistical error nor an accounting slip. It is the distance between the office where parasitic intermediaries draw up the pay scale and the ward where a doctor saves a child's life.
But the main point lies elsewhere. It would be a mistake to think the Ukrainian state simply does not know how to measure usefulness. It does, and it measures with great precision. Only it measures not usefulness to the country, but usefulness to those who sit at the till. The bureaucracy has its own ruler, a mirror image of the three circles around the child. At its centre stands not a child but the distribution of money, and everyone is judged by how well they serve and protect that distribution. The payroll this column began with is exactly such a ruler, only written in hryvnias.
Look at the figures again, this time through that ruler. Over the same six months in which doctors were promised a raise, Supreme Court judges added almost 140,000 hryvnias to their average salary. Why judges in particular? Because to a corrupt official, a judge's office is the most valuable in the country. It is the judge who decides whether a case reaches a verdict or collapses on a technicality, and whether seized assets are returned. Not every judge trades on this, but the till pays the office precisely for that possibility. The judge stands between the one who steals and punishment. A doctor offers no such service to anyone at the till. His usefulness goes to the patient, and patients do not draw up pay scales.
Now it is clear why the scale is upside down. It is not broken; it simply counts in a different currency. The doctor, the teacher, the midwife and the activist are useful to the country, and so to the bureaucracy they are costs to be minimised. The judge on whom a verdict depends, the official who writes the pay scale, the commission chief who signs the papers are useful to the till, and so to the till they are an investment to be maintained. In such a state a salary does not reward work. It pays for loyalty.
That is why the judges got a money, and the doctors got a promise. And that is the whole formula.