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Comment by helboi4 | Hacker News Reader

I really do not care but that is because the economy has incentivised me to get into work I don't care about. It is completely unprofitable to do things I do care about. So I don't do them. So everything I do do, I don't care about. Of course, I would hope if I was a doctor or sth where I really affected people's lives, I would care just for their sake if nothing else. But I'm a developer. It's really not that deep. Let me be an artist without me and my sick mother going homeless and I would actually care.

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If everybody followed their hearts deepest passions, we’d all be starving.

I do see your point. But that is why what the article describes is an inevitable problem.

Edit: I also do think that if I didn't do my job, nobody would be starving, and I am greatly overcompensated for it. Doctors, nurses, teachers, farmers... all of those jobs that are wildly more important for society to function are way less paid than my job fixing bugs in a corporate website, which is a fundamental flaw in the system if the aim is to incentivise people to keep society running well. For example, I know someone who is a doctor who is trying to leave to work at a hedge fund because the work is so under-compensated. This is a massive problem.

But your work may contribute to a product that helps a doctor, nurse or teacher do their job.

Even if it does not directly do that, maybe your fellow workers use the income they get from the company existence to raise their kid who becomes a doctor, nurse, etc.

This does not solve the problem that people are compensated based on the ability to create profit and the trendiness of the industry, not on usefulness. If I allow a kid of someone in my company to go to med school and then they drop out of being a doctor because the pay sucks and become yet another financier/dev/consultant/middle manager/entrepreneur of fairly useless business, then the system still failed.

Yes, I understand where you are coming from, and public workers should definitely be paid better, but I'm just focusing on one part of your argument which I find specious.

I'm saying you have a skewed idea of usefulness. Relative usefulness can only be properly evaluated when you look at the big picture.

The fact that you are not seeing the immediate usefulness of what you are doing does not necessarily mean much. Even a comedian can be incredibly useful if he helps stave of mental and emotional distress that could contribute to burn out or shoddy work among those doing the supposedly more "useful" work.

I don't have a skewed idea of usefulness, you are just trying to justify your loyalty to a system that will fuck any logical priorties over for profit in order to cope with our current reality. I'm coping by having a job that is not very useful but makes profit, but I am not fooling myself to believe this system is virtuous.

And yes I would say an artist or comedian is far, far more useful than a middle manager at a company managing devs fixing minor bugs on a website for a superfluous business. Back to my original point, I would probably give more to society as an artist than a dev. Some people would bring more to society as a dev than an artist, mind. In a world where we got paid just to be actually useful, there would be less devs and they'd all be better at their jobs.

I think it can be subdivided into value creators and value movers.

A comedian, doctor, farmer, or teacher creates value. They directly produce something that benefits other humans.

The financial sector, marketing, sales, real-estate conglomerates, etc I see as value movers. They don't actually create something themselves, but rather move it from someplace else to themselves, thereby forcing others to play the same game not to get outcompeted. It's pretty hard to argue marketing or hedge funds aren't a zero-sum game.

Unless you can find a person who's deepest passion is feeding others.

I don't know about that. We might not have all the choices for eating we have now, but there are a lot of people (even in my own family) that like growing/ hunting for, and serving food for some reason. At this point we have all the resources and knowledge to produce the food needed to survive, but it's in human (animal) nature to always want more than nature provides.

Yeah I think a lot of people care about that stuff.

Yeah but most people aren't farmers. How much economic value gets tied up in investment schemes? How many people worked for years on crypto or the metaverse or what-have-you—projects that only existed to boost stock price, rather than because anyone needed them?

Our society doesn't optimize the lifestyles of its citizens. It optimizes stock price, which leads to an economy where everyone works a lot, even on things nobody needs, in pursuit of returns for investors. Does the Silicon Valley VC unicorn portfolio model actually help anyone other than VCs and founders?

Exactly. A lot of people would be bring more value to society doing literally ANYTHING else than working on the metaverse or something but they won't get compensated the same for the actually useful stuff.

And when the metaverse bubble bursts because Zuckerberg is tired of burning money, those people will get laid off. On top of wasting resources, it creates instability.

Doctors usually only care about money, and use regulatory capture to get it. That's why the US spends 27% of GDP on doctors and hospitals even though we only see a doctor mostly an hour per year.

27% of gdp on doctors and hospitals, are you sure youre not missing a middleman or two in there?

Look it up.

well i looked it up and i dont see anything that says 27% or anywhere near it

Sorry, I'm British so I have a totally different perspective. Healthcare is mainly public here and the salaries suck. Nobody becomes a doctor to be rich. They become one because its a decent job and they want to help people. Of course you can be a private doctor but this is seen as publicly shameful. So I think that proves that there are other reasons people become doctors. Anyway, the issue in the UK is, the salaries used to be good but just not excellent, and would become excellent with a decent specialty. They also were guaranteed an excellent pension for their service to the country. Now doctors I know make just above minimum wage and I make basically double them as a junior dev (not at FAANG and devs aren't paid 6 figures over here, I make less than £50k). This has come from years of defunding public services from people who believe in the power of capitalism to.... create more finance bros and 1x engineers?

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