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Comment by bravo22 | Hacker News Reader

If other people aren't willing to trade their magical tokens for your services then your services are not valuable.

That is not the same thing as saying just beacuse you have no valuable skills you deserve to die of hunger and disease.

People are quite willing. The entertainment industry is huge, between TV, concerts, theatre productions, etc. However, does that money come down to the artist or the people doing the work? The issue is that this idea also applies to other people areas as well, such as teacher or journalists. These are services that are valuable, but they are not paid well.

They're paid based on supply and demand through their employers. Meaning the organization favours paying someone in a management position a higher salary, rather than the rank and file. The same industry pays certain actors or musicians outsized fees.

This is not a question of ethics or fairness, it is supply and demand. You can only pay X people Y amount when starting with K dollars.

I am not trying to be pedantic here but simple rules at large scale produce complex results that may sometimes seem counter intuitive or unfair. Evolution is simple rules applied at scale and it produces results that don't seem quite right but are obviously effective because they survive.

Again, the real issue I have isn't "fairness". It's the simple notation that just because a major doesn't make as much money as another makes it "worthless" and not innovative. It's the notion that we're more innovative because we can work with CSS divs. It's the notion that if you can't do math or STEM, you should just become a business major because everything else you do is veritably worthless. That is what I'm pushing back against.

I see what you mean. I agree with you that it is incorrect to say that it is not innovative, or new, or useful. Those don't always correlate with monetary value.

The author however is talking about value in monetary terms, as in what other people are willing to pay you for it therefore something innovative or cool can indeed be "worthless" in the same way that a beautiful painting is worthless to a thirsty man in the desert.

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