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Comment by YokoZar | Hacker News Reader

A similarly cold calculation I recently did was to compare my lifetime productivity to the aggregate value of all my blood products. As a regular plasma donor, it wasn't until age 27 that my total labor output had finally surpassed my use as spare parts, and that was because of a relatively high salary.

That calculation doesn't yet include the expected value of my harvested organs should I die, and while it's harder to put a price on organs than blood (which is sold to hospitals) it's reasonable to presume they're extremely expensive.

Morbid as it is, this perhaps shouldn't be too surprising in a world where there are individuals earning 1000 times as much as others. If it were possible to directly trade lifespan, a 1000x earner could double his lifespan by shaving 1% off 100 people, compensate them with 2x their lifetime earnings, and still have 800 times as much as the typical person left over.

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Your calculation doesn't take into account cost of production.

Which is close to zero, provided you're willing to lock up a whole bunch of women as baby factories and go bottom-dollar of keeping the livestock fed.

Organs are considered valuable because it's illegal to sell them, the black market price doesn't reflect a potential market price. You also aren't de-rating the general worth of human lives in a society where organ harvesting like this were common place.

Or to put it another way: there's so much insanely wrong with this that it's the height of tech-minded naivete to think what you've come up with is a meaningful number.

Let's not conflate cost and value here. The price people pay for my blood is at least the value to them. The same goes for my labor. I'd say the buyer gets a greater value per dollar paid from my lifesaving blood than they do from my relatively mundane laboring. By that reasoning I'm more valuable as spare parts, not less.

The implication of the calculation isn't nearly as sweeping as you think, it's merely that more people should donate blood. Especially if it has low "cost" to them compared to others (say, because they're not queasy about it).

Given what we know about what people are willing to pay for both, I think it's fairly clear what society values more. If an evil genie forced me to choose between reliving my life in a way that either deprived the world of my blood products or of my labor, and I knew that on the basis of money alone my blood was more valuable, then unless I was doing some particularly civic-minded work it would seem obvious I'd contribute more as an unemployed blood donor.

Of course then there'd be relatively few people doing your mundane laboring...

That's my point: this calculation doesn't produce a meaningful number. It's why we regulate and exclude it from the market to start with: its get weird quickly, and its why my example is as it is - because it you really start thinking about it, making more blood isn't that difficult.

It is morbid. It's also a twilight zone episode.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Self-Improvement_of_Salvado...

In such a circumstance we might even hazard that's a win for everyone. 1000x earners are presumably doing something great for the world to be worth that much.

There are plenty of ways to earn high financial returns without returning much to society. Externalities and rent-seeking are two planet-sized holes in market economic theory.

I'd go so far as to say there may be almost an inverse correlation between earnings and use to society. (medical profession excepted).

So the unemployed & collecting welfare are the most useful to society?

No, of course not. Actors, sports stars and high frequency traders are.

(I guess my post should have read "earned income").

Edit: actually my post does reference earning rather than simply collecting. Unemployed and those on welfare don't earn. So what is your point exactly?

While they're trotted out by the kleptocrats, actors and athletes in general aren't of the super-rich. *

"Starving actor" is pretty much a trope. Superstars are rare, though they do again tend to display a winner-take-all (or much) tendency. Even successful actors often struggle once their careers are over. For actresses, that's not infrequently by their mid-30s, though there's some longevity being evidenced now. Perhaps 50-something is the new 30-something.

Similarly with athletes. Success is rare, and careers are often very brief. Consequences (especially in contact sports) are also high -- American football players have notoriously low life expectancy.

The other element is that the negative product of actors and athletes is pretty low. OK, perhaps energy and resource utilization extravagance in coverage of their work by hack writers, but that's about it. They're not destroying companies, felling tropical rainforests, or invading countries. If you're particularly unlucky, they may give a popular face to a hideous ideology (say, Mel Gibson or wartime propoganda of numerous stripes). A few gambling problems and wrecked marriages, but the same can come of dice, cards, or drink rather more readily.

________________________________

* Clarification: nor do they comprise a significant portion of the super-rich. If you look at the Forbes 400, very few of the entries are even associated with entertainment. From the 2011 list, I find, searching for "Television", "Entertainment", and "Movies":

Key: Rank:Name:Wealth:Age:City:Source

78:Saban, Haim:2,800:60:Beverly Hills, CA:Television

83:Spielberg, Steven Allen:2,700:58:Pacific Palisades, CA:Movies

235:Winfrey, Oprah:1,400:51:Chicago, IL:Television

320:Siegel, Herbert:1,100:77:New York, NY:Television

375:Sillerman, Robert FX:975:57:New York, NY:Entertainment

One is an actor (in any significant fashion).

Haim Saban: businessman / financier, record, film, & TV producer.

Steven Spielberg is, of course, a director.

Oprah Winfrey is a television and media celebrity and owner.

Herbert Siegel is better known as Herbert "Herb" Ellis, a character actor, known for portrayals of law enforcement officers on film and TV. He helped create Dragnet, Joe Friday, Room Five, The D.A.'s Man, and Peter Gunn.

Ah, and two listings under sports:

164:Kroenke, E Stanley:1,800:58:Columbia, MO:Sports, real estate

346:Jacobs, Jeremy Maurice Sr:1,000:65:East Aurora, NY:Sports concessions

Kroenke owns the LA Rams.

Jacobs owns the Boston Bruins.

Neither is a professional athlete.

Well, you make a good point and I speak half in jest regarding athletes and actors.(Although famous actors do make a lot of money).

I guess I just noticed this a long time ago in large companies. A guy at the top makes a lot of money. He often provides a symbolic role, a bit of (often bad) strategy, much ass covering, credit taking, bus pushing and ladder climbing... but the real services the company provides are actually carried out by people making much less.

So... I maintain, that the actual importance to society of task performed is often inversely correlated with earning.

Y'know, there are arguments which could be made for that.

I'm not entirely sure I'm prepared to make it, but I'm not entirely sure I'm prepared to say I wouldn't either.

My understanding is that doctors net incomes have fallen fairly considerably in the US over the past 30-40 years.

There's an argument to be made that medical benefits aren't all they're hyped up to be. The decades during which life expectancy improved most in the US were the 1910s (for women) and 1920s (for men). This was largely the result of municipal sanitation, sewerage, increased food production, refrigeration, and improvements in pregnancy, childbirth, and early childhood care.

In the past 50 years, most life expectancy improvements can be attributed to falling rates of smoking and drinking, and improved automobile safety.

There's a timeline of introduction of vaccines for various diseases, the period from 1920-1960 was particularly active. A few others (notably Hep-C and HPV) have come on-line since.

Acute medical intervention actually accomplishes relatively little.

I meant, aside from those holes. Should have elaborated better.

Those holes account for the vast majority of liquid and personal wealth.

What say you now?

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