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Comment by Paul_S | Hacker News Reader

What about all the people working in marketing, software patent lawyers, drug dealers? You want them to quit their jobs?

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Let me make my point in a less obtuse way. Most people make decisions about their careers based on opportunity and maximising profit. No one becomes a footballer to make the world a better place. This would all be fine as long as the capitalist market rewarded choices that make the world a better place. Obviously it does not and it's not the fault of a footballer that we as a civilisation choose to channel our available resources their way and not towards frivolous play like space exploration.

If anyone ever figures out a way to make the free market choose the greater good they will win all the Nobel prizes forever (we won't need Nobel prizes after that).

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Believe it or not, there are different motivations people have for choosing their careers. Some become footballers because they want to rake in as much money as Beckham, others because they enjoy football so much that they decide that's what they want to do all the time. I'm pretty sure most people don't have just one overriding motivation for what they do, but an amalgam of different factors. Your statement about maximizing profit as a primary motivator is less of a factual statement and more of a revelation about your own motivations.

Most of the world population doesn't have the kind of opportunities you do. You are probably at the top 5% of the 7 billion population. Chances are you can choose between a 100k job and a 120k job that you find unsavory and maybe you choose the lower paid one. Most of the population has different choices to make. You are the one projecting your privelaged position onto the rest of the world.

...make the world a better place.

Just what the hell does anyone even mean by "make the world a better place"?!

I am willing to bet that if we held a forum to settle what a "better world" means, we'd have to adjourn it with no resolution. The questions of better world for whom, and on what terms, by what definition, what expense and, oh yeah, who pays the bill and why would never find one conclusion.

What you really mean to say is that Capitalist market rewarded choices does make the world a better place according to your definition of it. But don't lay claim to speak for the world when for many Capitalism market rewards are making the world a better place.

The world is a better place when our desires are attained.

Desires are almost bottomless though

If only there was a way, a vehicle so to speak, for liberating ourselves from the suffering of our desires.

Even Hitler's desires?

One has to remember that "a better world" is a very subjective thing.

Hitler thought he was making the world a better place.

As did Pol Pot and other mass murderers.

This is why I distrust those that want to direct us toward a magical, "better world" and and do so by decrying voluntary exchanges between people as counter to their vision.

I think you're wrong about one thing. You see, you always think of the greater good as you define it. However, watching a football star is the desire of many, and they pay money for it, so the football star is in fact doing it for the greater good by entertaining many. Capitalism moves in the direction of where the money is - and the money is in things people want. So capitalism is a most efficient machine to produce things for the greater good. Any other definition of 'greater good', i.e. yours, would have to be forced on them by the force of law and ultimately, threats and violence.

That's not necessarily true. Especially not if you also consider externalities.

"No one becomes a footballer to make the world a better place."

Maybe not, but Messi increases the happiness delta a lot for many, many people. I think the world is a much better place with him as a footballer than an accountant or something.

Are you sure the net happiness from football was really raised by Messi or did he simply shift it to his county and teams he plays for? If you take away his great play doesn't it just make other players stick out more, and fans would derive happiness from other players?

Only one other player stands out as much. It seems silly to say that either should have been an accountant, because if he were, then the same arguments would apply to the other.

http://fivethirtyeight.com/features/lionel-messi-is-impossib...

Given the way he has handled his taxes, it is safe to say that he would make a poor accountant anyway.

I bet he has made one or more rich accountants.

He raises the net happiness. He does things no one else does and is a joy to watch. It's like saying if a great musician never lived people would just listen to different music. Sure, but there would be a certain joy and pleasure people never would have experienced, and never realized they were missing.

If they never realized they were missing something, then nothing was lost. Net happiness = same level.

You could say that for just about anything, including Tesla...

Tesla make a lot of people happy but there must be accountants at Jaguar, BMW etc. who have not enjoyed losing sales to the California start up. However there are many happy Tesla customers and only a small handful of motor company accountants. Obviously there are sales staff too plus suits in the oil companies who have been pained by Tesla, but still the balance is a net happy one. Compare with Tony Blair, makes his business cronies happy but inflicts more misery.

Footballers do have a connection with their fans and it is their admiration that is sought far more than money. So they are very much in it to bring happiness to the world, to put on the show. I don't see them working for free though.

Are you sure the net happiness from football was really raised by Messi or did he simply shift it to his county and teams he plays for?

Yes

If you take away his great play doesn't it just make other players stick out more, and fans would derive happiness from other players?

Greatness isn't ONLY about being greater than others.

It's a team effort, not necessarily an individual effort.

The people in marketing are the ones helping to bring the positive utility-delta stuff to light, so the utility delta actually happens.

That strategy is similar to our current best strategy for bringing peace by killing more people than the enemy. It's proven to work but it is very wasteful on both sides.

Segmenting a market, analyzing user needs, determining optimal pricing and developing effective messaging (among other things) is wasteful...how?

Segmenting a market is often suboptimal. See how Intel is "segmenting" their CPU market by hard locking features in "consumer" CPUs. This effectively means they are not available unless you pay big big money.

Why is that suboptimal? It certainly is suboptimal for consumers in the short run, since it helps Intel increase producer surplus. How that producer surplus is used to create better technology has a pretty important role in determining whether it's optimal in the longer run.

I actually don't think that most people make decisions about their careers based on maximizing profit at all. In fact, I think very few people would choose a soul-sucking job running against their values just because it pays more.

Some people way happiness at a job more importantly than quality of life outside of it.

The argument isn't about soul-sucking jobs, but about jobs that don't contribute to society. I'm sure there are people out there who enjoy cold-calling and scamming people.

But to address your argument: you missed the "opportunity" bit. If you're a well-off, well educated person you can choose to do whatever you feel like and I'm sure some people do without worrying about money (perhaps they have lots already). Most people will chose the best paying job that is available to them. Sorry, but reality is on my side on this one. Go visit a factory if you want to see if people want self-realisation or money to survive. Again: please remember the "opportunity" part. If you tell a factory worker he can earn 4$ an hour assembling landmines or 2$ an hour assembling asthma inhalers I will eat my hat if they don't go with the money (and I wouldn't blame them for this).

HN's privilege is showing pretty badly here in these comments. Seem to be completely oblivious to the oppressive squalor that most the world lives in, only thinking about which high-paying cushy job they should take to "change the world."

Well you know, we were talking about Elon Musk after all. So that kinda assumes, that we're not talking about jobs for survival kind of situation. Even if it is the vast majority of population.

Speaking from my own experience, I've known quite a few people working in factories that didn't want "desk jobs" or to be "paper pushers", even if those jobs paid more. And some even had the turned down promotion offers to prove it.

I didn't miss the opportunity bit. It seems your logic there is backwards: It's precisely if I can choose to do whatever I feel like that I have opportunity, and precisely those people you agree may have other goals than maximizing profit.

Sure, if you have no money and have an "opportunity" to flip burgers, most people would take that job even if they were vegans. That's survival, but I don't think that says much about what they would choose to do.

A better example I think is when people decide to go back to school because they've realized they only get shitty jobs without education. In that situation, they could choose to do whatever. Do most people find a list of best-paying jobs and pick the one at the top to decide what they should study? I think they do not.

> What about all the people working in marketing, software patent lawyers, drug dealers? You want them to quit their jobs?

Yes, that would help a whole lot.

Really you chose your career only from a profit motive? What are you, a sales person?

I certainly did not chose my profession from a profit motive and neither did most of the people I know. We did what we did because that is what we like or enjoy. Of course practical issues of making a living wage factors in.

I make a high salary now, but that is rather by accident. I just happened to be good in STEM subjects and enjoy math and programming. I didn't pursue it because it was an optimal economic decision.

I can fully relate to Elon Musk. When I try to pick a programming job e.g. I factor in many things such as salary, colleagues, location etc, but actually how useful the product seems is a major factor for me. I am generally willing to sacrifice salary to do something which I feel helps humanity more. E.g. I'd day a pay cut to develop a medical application over a horse betting application.

Of course money isn't irrelevant. If there is just too little money in medical software then I'd suck it up and sell my soul to betting, big oil or whatever ;-)

I think quite a few of the respondents are missing the point because you said that most people choose to "maximise profit" which has a negative connotation. (Or apparently so, in their minds)

I read your comment as saying that most people choose a job based on maximising utility; one component of which is financial reward; and that top-class sports is one industry in which there is generally a consensus that "people are paid too much" - i.e. that there is a distortion; that perhaps their love of playing and the positives they contribute to society are already well priced in to their wages.

Also, it seems entirely reasonable to me that any market distortion implies an opportunity cost - that aggregate happiness; over time, would be greater; if we spent a little less on footballers and a little more on e.g. imho; carbon capture!

You even explicitly state that it would be extremely judgemental to blame individuals - i.e. footballers - for maximising their individual happiness at the expense of human society as a whole; and that instead this should be blamed on a market or political failure.

Now this is an insult to number of jobs which are chosen by skilled enough to get better paid jobs but they won't. Examples - doctors & nurses, most people in disaster orgs like Red Cross, Doctors without Frontiers etc. and I am sure many other types of jobs out there (corporate vs creative job, anybody?)

Not every one needs to subscribe to the world view that a person has to win spectacularly at big things to find meaning in life.

Quite the opposite, they should be given unions and then we can finally admit to all living in Ankh-Morpork [1].

  [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ankh-Morpork

Nah bro, as a billionaire, I make all of my money to help the world.

'Tis an interesting point.

> Drug dealers

Perhaps drug dealers (and their suppliers) can implement testing, QA and proper labeling.

I'm not totally sure about software patent lawyers. But, deep down, my gut says that if software patent law wasn't to crappy, perhaps the occupation would be perceived in a better light. Maybe they could push for reform from the inside?

On the whole, I think every industry can do some introspection on how they can affect more people for the betterment of society. It would do us all some good.

If anyone ever figures out a way to make the free market choose the greater good they will win all the Nobel prizes forever (we won't need Nobel prizes after that).

Why isn't some entertainment - even if it's somewhat frivolous - for the greater good?

An hour spent watching a football game is an hour less committing crime or doing other unsavory acts.

But agreed - that person would win all the Nobel Peace prizes.

> An hour spent watching a football game is an hour less committing crime or doing other unsavory acts.

Not for the vast, vast majority of people watching football. Most people aren't engaging in crime or "unsavory acts" whenever they have to entertain themselves.

I think mass entertainment is definitely for the greater good, but not because it reduces crime in any appreciable fashion.

Maybe not crime, but also stops people from doing any other bad things.

Not to mention the good social bits of being a fan of something and being able to bond with strangers over fandom.

Also stops some people from doing good things - they'd be bored, so they'd either go after politics (yup, either big or local), actual art (ok), maybe make something as in crafts (probably best outcome).

I'm wary of the specific claim about sports (or better, I do almost completely disagree with it).

But if you look at the worst offenders, you'll see that the professions that take the most profit normally also take the most power. And in yielding that power, they have a big share on the blame of making their negative utility profession lucrative.

Free markets are the problem, not the solution. You're not going to get much strategic planetary intelligence out of a system designed to maximise short-term profit. The absolute best you can hope for is the occasional individual like Musk who takes a longer view.

Politics - which includes economics - is a much bigger challenge than AI.

We've completely transformed our understanding of science and technology, but our political and economic thinking would be recognisable to a Roman senator and a medieval banker.

Politics and economics are still waiting for a Copernican revolution. Our survival prospects as a species are limited until that revolution happens.

Hmm that doesn't seem to make sense. Free markets (which include the vast majority of countries on the planet) enable people to create wealth. Maybe some sort of mix of a planet-wide initiative and the normal free markets we have would make sense. Calling free markets "the problem" doesn't really do anything for anybody.

Free markets are an optimal pachinko machine for distributing capital, that needs no oversight or central direction.

It doesn't generate its own pachinko balls, that's utterly orthogonal. Free market capitalism is what you DO with a population that has disposable income. You can't feed the bottom of it into the top, it doesn't even work that way.

It's not even optimal for reaching the highest developments of ideas and inventions, because local maximums will starve out the newer ideas that need to grow and become competitive. It does nothing about network effects and tends towards monopoly.

But it's a fantastic distribution mechanism for the wealth of existing populations: no overseer required! Within some known limitations it works very nicely.

NO wealth is ever created.

How are you defining wealth?

Thank you for clarifying. I do agree that it is expected to optimize ones career for maximum income.

Even so, an individual can often choose to push for the greater good within the confines of free market forces.

A footballer can use their image to promote organizations that do good. A SaaS owner can help their customers become more secure and efficient. Lawyers can push for better oversight and reform.

Maybe we can't all be Elon, but we can all try to improve our surroundings.

Maybe I'm too young and naive, but I think it can be done.

> Maybe they could push for reform from the inside?

Here's an example, Mozilla's Open Software Patent License, trying to do some reform from the inside: https://www.mozilla.org/about/policy/patents/

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