Here's how you determine who brings more value to society: If they were to just stop coming to work tomorrow, would society keep going?
If every ticktocker quit tomorrow, would society still function? Yes. Things would go on like nothing ever happened.
If every surgeon quit tomorrow, would society still function? No, people would die, they would become timid and afraid of being hurt, because minor injuries would be fatal and life changing. Not only that, we would lose centuries worth of knowledge and be forced to learn it all from scratch again from books instead of trained surgeons.
The danger in your logic is it leads to thinking like this: "ticktockers provide more value than surgeons because they can scale their reach, therefore in order to maximize total value to society, we can maximize the number of ticktickers and we don't have to worry about surgeons. We can just offset the lost value by the value brought by all the ticktockers."
That's an obvious bad idea and straw man, but people really try to go down that slippery slope in non-obvious cases. The realm of education comes to mind. "MOOCs are more valuable than universities because they have more reach, therefore in the future we will close down universities and only have MOOCs" is something I've heard seriously proposed before.
You have the delusion that true value is the same as a fungible one dimensional number, that externalities (negative or positive) don't exist, we have perfect information and local minima aren't real.
The original example is that certain economic activities are force multipliers, the guy who actually does a good job in servicing the metro in my city (we avoid 10 minutes of delay) has more impact than most local CEO day to day. A good supply of bus drivers make certain services possible, which in turn boost productivity.
The social influencer entertains like shitty cocaine, we don't have a lack of inane shit, their absurd payout exists because ZIRP happened. Bad entertainment has costs beyond the directly measured by dollars.
Getting everybody addicted to nicotine is profitable but bad, correct?
A hypothetical world were we "stagnated" on MySpace equivalents could've existed and surely the generated value would be higher.
if you think the metro guy/girl provides more value then he/she should be paid more. tough luck because its not the market that decides his wage unfortunately.
Yes. They provide a scaled entertainment. You are forgetting the reach that this person has.
Compared to a surgeon who's impact is more local, they might help a few patients in a week.
Do you think a combat soldier is more important than a VP of Google?
Here's how you determine who brings more value to society: If they were to just stop coming to work tomorrow, would society keep going?
If every ticktocker quit tomorrow, would society still function? Yes. Things would go on like nothing ever happened.
If every surgeon quit tomorrow, would society still function? No, people would die, they would become timid and afraid of being hurt, because minor injuries would be fatal and life changing. Not only that, we would lose centuries worth of knowledge and be forced to learn it all from scratch again from books instead of trained surgeons.
The danger in your logic is it leads to thinking like this: "ticktockers provide more value than surgeons because they can scale their reach, therefore in order to maximize total value to society, we can maximize the number of ticktickers and we don't have to worry about surgeons. We can just offset the lost value by the value brought by all the ticktockers."
That's an obvious bad idea and straw man, but people really try to go down that slippery slope in non-obvious cases. The realm of education comes to mind. "MOOCs are more valuable than universities because they have more reach, therefore in the future we will close down universities and only have MOOCs" is something I've heard seriously proposed before.
You have the delusion that true value is the same as a fungible one dimensional number, that externalities (negative or positive) don't exist, we have perfect information and local minima aren't real.
The original example is that certain economic activities are force multipliers, the guy who actually does a good job in servicing the metro in my city (we avoid 10 minutes of delay) has more impact than most local CEO day to day. A good supply of bus drivers make certain services possible, which in turn boost productivity.
The social influencer entertains like shitty cocaine, we don't have a lack of inane shit, their absurd payout exists because ZIRP happened. Bad entertainment has costs beyond the directly measured by dollars.
Getting everybody addicted to nicotine is profitable but bad, correct?
A hypothetical world were we "stagnated" on MySpace equivalents could've existed and surely the generated value would be higher.
if you think the metro guy/girl provides more value then he/she should be paid more. tough luck because its not the market that decides his wage unfortunately.
Yeah we knew that, that's the point.