Given how the academic careers are structured, I do think "privilege" is a very bad word to use here. It's no more of a privilege than working most of your time documenting why you should get a promotion on Google like people were discussing yesterday. But it's one of the many very real problems academia has nowadays.
There are 4,000 colleges and universities in the US. At the VAST majority of those institutions -- perhaps 80% -- professors spend 40 hours per week teaching courses. They teach 3 university courses per semester with 40-400 students per course, with the lower enrollment courses requiring a pretty heavy lift per student (lots of office hours, labor-intensive grading of proofs or long papers or large programs, etc). That's 40 hours of work, sometimes more.
Hacker news massively over-estimates the number of "elite R1 faculty" and under-estimates the number of faculty who are essentially just college teachers.
There are many careers that produce not just zero, but negative value to society, and academia is nowhere near the top of that list.
Also, have you seen what professors have to fill out to get a grant to fund their research?
I'm not aware of almost anyone except for academics that prioritize maximizing societal good. I guess in addition to teachers, firefighters and librarians as well.
Certainly I doubt anyone on this board does that.
Teachers so teach, firefighters do fight fires when those appear, and librarians do organize books. They don't get to not pay attention to those tasks and still be successful.
The comment was "worry about bringing the most value to society". And you think that's what pretty much anyone does? Finance, ad-tech, real-estate flippers, and numerous others may not even add any value. Others are all about internalizing profit and externalizing costs. At the very least, "bringing value so society" is a tertiary goal for most people.
I choose a few people who could be making more doing something else. I'm sure, some people who work at nonprofits could also make more in a different field. But those are the only people I've seen worry about bringing value to society.
Know anyone who got an advertised rate on a mortgage to buy a freshly renovated home?
The fun fact about valuable things is that people often pay for them with money. Where money changes hands there's value changing hands.
No. I know people who got an advertised rate to buy a non-recently-renovated home (including one who decided to take a year-ish sabbatical to totally rebuild and repair the house herself as a life-goal). Others either didn't renovate the old style or renovated it the way they wanted.
I take that back. I do know at least one person who bought a freshly renovated home out of foreclosure auction. But that was because of the price, not the renovations.
But again, you're conflating "add any value" to "worry about adding the most value to society"
Good point.
"The most" implies that there's some objective total ordering. Subjectively, I think people are guided by their subjectively personal notions of "adding value" and "society".
For example, if you looked at my behavior from the outside, I am not adding the most value to society in your metric. But I swear that I am a rational, optimizing agent in my own goofy metric. :)