This is not the case for most Olympians, because even for sports that are not attracting large amounts of visitors and viewers and therefore sponsorships, you still basically need to dedicate your life to it.
You don't need to dedicate your life to writing code unless you are working for an early-stage startup or Elon Musk. So you have spare time which you can use to write code.
Like decreasing quality of life for everybody through ad-tech.
> I'd love to see that energy and drive [...]
I'm a former professional athlete in a marginalized sports. Sadly never made it to Olympia. I learned that energy and drive by doing my sport, and I wasn't "born" with it (well, maybe with the genes, but it's something one has to learn IMHO). I think I am now what I am thanks to doing sports for more than 5 year as my main activity (in terms of invested time) and maybe 10 years as secondary activity.
Money was always tight, and I was happy to leave my sport with a "black zero" on my bank account. I never did it for the money, but I'm happy to not ran into bankrupcty just for my dream. And that's what I hope is the minimum for every athlete.
I'm an absolute middling athlete. In my 40s. Half a life spent at a desk. And then I picked up a bit of running/cycling as one does. And joined a local club, and became absolutely inspired by the people of all ages at the club entering competitions, doing big feats of endurance. Just for the love of the sport, or the thrill of achieving something difficult.
I'm still a middling athlete but now one that makes sure to fit in a bit of exercise each week and continues to make solid progress. So even if you haven't won any medals, you've likely inspired someone into making changes for the better.
(Yes obviously there are extreme and very visible edge cases, but 99.999% of things normal people get paid to do is something valuable for their neighbor)
I do not see the virtue in athletics given that being an entertainer, and being powerful and fit are intrinsically rewarding enough. I'd much rather we were funding musicians and artists, but only a fraction of funding goes to these in comparison to the behemoth that is sports.
No, they don't. The olympics in particular have been shown not to have any sort of lasting effect on host countries or the world in general.
AFAICT this whole thing is a fallacy dreamt up as part of the justification for spending billions on games.
My intuition is that you will find a small and decreasing number of people agree with or believe this
Consider the counterfactual. In order for it to be true that many people are paid for work that isn't valuable, it'd have to be true that many people are willingly parting with their money for no reason at all.
That does happen, of course, and it's so special we think highly of people when they do it (it's called charity).
Just because people can't reason about the transmission of value throughout a complex economy doesn't mean it's not happening. In fact that's the beauty of currency and market economies: it doesn't need to be comprehensible to anyone outside of the transaction.
By analogy, good engines produce power. A speedometer measures the engine's power under a set of conditions. However, a speedometer is not (by itself) a good way to measure an engine because there are other factors you care about. The fact that a speedometer is a bad measure of engine power does not mean that engine power is unimportant or bad.
If I said, "high max speed means good engine," or "high GDP means economy is working well," your comment would be relevant.
I did not say that. I said "the overwhelming majority of transactions in an economy are of mutual benefit to the transactors."
Consider FooCorp paying an advertiser to convince people to buy its gizmos rather than the market leader Bar Inc.'s widgets. This is then followed by Bar Inc. paying the same advertiser to convince the same people to go back to buying widgets again. Each transaction is to the benefit of both the advertiser and the respective manufacturer, but taken together leaves the world in the same state as it was to begin with. No value was created. In fact, value was destroyed (the opportunity cost of labor by the advertiser).
An example of a transaction that is not to the mutual benefit of the transactors, yet increases value is the levying of fines against behavior which has externalized costs greater than their internalized gains. The fine is not to the benefit of the party it is levied against, but the effect of deterring negative-total-value behavior is equivalent to creating value.
I'm not convinced >99% of people's jobs are of the value-creating kind but it's certainly well above 50%. Several of the largest companies in our industry are arguably of the negative value kind. Insurance companies that accept premiums but deny legitimate claims certainly are.
A landlord or a holder of IP can and will arrange deals that have negative value for society because of the fact it attracts monetary value for them.
A client paying for a service, is this done 'willingly' when it is needed and no other choice exists? If someone wants to compete, can they navigate the moats companies are so fond of?
Agreed on landlords -- this is a rather unique but huge failure case. My comment history is full of harping on this particular point :)
> A client paying for a service, is this done 'willingly' when it is needed and no other choice exists?
Yeah obviously you can do the work yourself.
Who cares there's no money in it? Lots of things that have been corrupted with money are also hardly worth pursuing.
By that standard if survival means that we have to return to child sacrifice or something else so heinous then I guess engaging in anything but is also privileged.
These people are pursuing the survival of their souls. If you lose that, you cannot regain it. And time is not an athlete’s friend. You can always make money. It’s not going anywhere.
These are Olympic athletes, they are on the extreme edge.
>> I'd love to see that energy and drive rewarded and respected by society like self-actualization mattered, not just the next paycheck.
FTFY.
Let's not be condescending to athletic pursuit. Is that drive and passion really any different to the fuel of many a start-up hustler who, when their funding ran out, didn't really manage to change the world, with neither disruptive business model nor novel technical developments to show for it? Are they really so different from publish-or-perish academics toiling on some obscure edge of human knowledge which is more likely to either be a dead end or a small brick on which a cathedral of a grand discovery will be built upon rather than being THE paradigm-shifting, theory-unifying, revolutionary thesis?
Let's not be condescending to athletic pursuit because it's "just" entertainment. For a lot of people that struggle for faster, higher, stronger is inspiration, just as the early days of AirBnB/Facebook/Google is spoken of in hallowed tones in all-hands meetings, start-up mixers, and conferences, as motivation. Yeah, the ethics of the hustle might be questionable but fact of the matter is, at the end of the day, we all need heroes to look up to to some extent.
If code can be poetry then surely so can a gutsy maneuver, a clever tactic, or a sonofabitching Hail Mary of an opportunistic play. Sports---just as science, math, business, or literature---are narratives of struggle, human ingenuity, and achievement.
Some of their focus comes from just being naturally talented at their activity. I am really focused on coding, b/c I have a natural affinity to working with computers, but that doesn't mean I can focus on gymnastics.
But on the other hand, if you were to go watch a launch from SpaceX, You will find that there's already a crowd being inspired, experiencing joy, and it absolutely brings people together. So why not work more on that and less on sports?
You go find me a Space X launch in some of the countries that produce, say, top footballers. In those countries, then go find me a robust educational infrastructure. You won't find the educational resources for one to become a top aerospace engineer or astrophysicist in say, Ghana or Mali.
Sports are popular because enjoying them either by playing or watching doesn't require a ton of brain power.
Let people enjoy what they want, who are you (or I) to judge?
It's although very hard to just find something else, that gives you the same satisfaction as your favourite "past-time" - the only job that is as good as doing sport, is sport as a job.
You can't eat "more satisfying way to live for the soul", and if you can't convince people to sponsor your endeavors, then you'll have to get a job that produce goods/services people are willing to pay for, like most other people.
Oh darn that's good that nursing school is free then!/s
it matters to them; who cares whether it matters to you?
The Soviet Union used to give the award "Hero of Socialist Labour" to top performers in the labour force, and public spaces everywhere had billboards celebrating local labour performers.
Could you name any top labourer in your region, your country or the world? Any certain factory worker that comes to mind?