It's pretty hard to prove, but I bet that we're barely even at 1% utilization of humanity's potential, given our technology and population.
The nail salon workers could use their free time for this purpose if they wanted. They (perhaps with some rare exceptions) don't do it. On the other hand: The fact that someone is willing to give money to the nail salon workers for getting hands/feet pimped shows that someone values this kind of work.
first, that it can be more difficult for people to get an education (and in many cases, a professional job) depending on their background and thus have a much higher barrier to "cure cancer" type work. simply saying that they could is all well and good, but it ignores some harsh realities of life.
second, the fact that people value something does not necessarily make it important. so what if someone values their nails being done? who does it benefit? capital is a distribution of resources in order to maximise output. some of that output is chaff, but i'd argue that less chaff and more useful product is better for a society to prosper.
Markets form a democracy: Everybody can vote with their wallet what they want and consider as important.
By deciding to have children or not (and if yes: how many?), parents vote about the distribution of the startup positions for the next generation.
EDIT: In other words: Poor people should rather be angry about their parents than about the system.
1. "Parents vote about the distribution of the startup positions for the next generation." What?
2. "Poor people should rather be angry about their parents than about the system." Are you serious? What good is that going to do?
Sorry, but you must be living quite a privileged, or sheltered life if you believe these things.
The movie Idiocracy satirized one aspect of this, but it still doesn't get much discussion in terms of family planning on a societal scale -- whether to encourage or discourage childbearing, whether some groups should be encouraged more than others and the moral questions thereby raised, etc.
So, acting shocked and invoking "privilege" doesn't move the conversation forward, when there is ample underexplored territory in which to do so.
Wrong.
I think that is precisely what makes it important. As long as as individuals in a society have freedom of choice, the only way to approximate some objective measure of importance is by looking what they value in aggregate.
The things I think are important and the things you think are important are probably different. So who's right? From a practical standpoint, what makes a difference is what people think is important. As the other commenter mentioned, in capitalist society people clearly demonstrate what they think is important by spending their money.
If people chose to spend their money getting their nails done, then they do think that it's important. If enough people think it's important then it becomes so, and no-one can really tell them otherwise. This is the case as long as people have freedom to chose how they make money and how they spend it.
--
Homeless people can go to Harvard [1]
This guy build a hotel for $9000 [2]
People familiar with statistics can consistently win the lottery [3]
"Anyone can do it, why can't you?" /s
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liz_Murray
[2] https://www.littlethings.com/9000-dream-home/
[3] http://www.businessinsider.com/4-time-lottery-winner-not-exa...
* There are thousands if not millions of examples like this. Pointing to exceptions has never been a good argument. People who work in nail salons generally have a socioeconomic background that doesn't give them the privilege to be "wasting" time curing cancer. Suggesting that they can, or even should be doing this is insulting, at best.
Rich peoples hand and feet!? Do you have any idea how much a manicure costs? I just searched online for a place near me that does one and it's 27 USD. Is someone who can afford 27 USD for something that isn't food or shelter rich to you?
Do you think a high percentage of people who work at Nail salons are capable of contributing something significant to the frontiers of medical science? Or was that whole sentence just supposed to be a humorous line in a parody version of John Lennons "imagine" you're coming up with? Because if it was, it's gone completely over my head.
Maybe in 500 years people will stop trying to peddle a utopian "system" that has shown time and time again to impoverish people, retard the progress of entire nations, and - in many cases - kill millions.
There is tremendous unique potential (geniuses, savants, etc.) being wasted right now due to poverty or socio-cultural repressiveness. Those one in a thousand or one in a million individuals who are stuck somewhere and unable to live up to even a fraction of their potential. Einsteins, chandras, or feynmans who will live their lives doing menial work in a ghetto in the developing world instead of advancing human civilization.
On the other hand, that perspective also downplays the contributions that "ordinary" people can make. And in a way reveals some of the deep seated classicism that exists in our culture today. The truth is, that if you can work a job at McDonalds (and almost everyone on Earth is capable of doing so) there is a ton of other work that you can do that is vastly more valuable. If you can work at McDonalds you can be a scientist, no joke, or an engineer, or an artist. Maybe you can't be einstein, but for every einstein in science there are thousands upon thousands of researchers whose jobs aren't that much more challenging than working a typical "service" job. And that kind of thing is as much how we cure cancer and build/better civilization as the work of geniuses.
Which, I think, puts the waste of work/talent from having so much of the workforce stuck in "menial" jobs in even greater perspective.