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Comment by helboi4 | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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