Because being a nurse doesn’t scale. It’s better to provide a small amount of value to 100 million people than immense value to 10 people.
Perhaps it's more reasonable to say that providing a small amount of value to a larger amount of people is more profitable.
The world is full of people who simply aren’t capable of providing “value” at scale. Odds are that society gets better outcomes when the few who can do so pursue things like silly image filter apps (and sometimes actually useful things too) over nursing careers.
They rather have negative effects I would say: like a bad impact on teenager's self esteem or something like that.
But yeah, it's our society and it's values :)
In a way, scaling/globalism seems to be working against us.
Let’s also not forget the possibility of highly valuable and highly scalable pursuits.
1. People with the talent to make high-value/low-scale products (e.g. medical imaging) are working on low-value/high-scale products (silly apps). This is similar to how our brightest minds are making people click ads.
2. Apple and the HN reality distortion field make everybody (even those without the skills) believe they can become rich by creating low-value/high-scale apps.