Now all that's left to do is democratize that and you have a perfect world, no? That is to say increase the pool of such jobs from 10,000 to 10,000,000
I think need has less to do with it than you suggest. We don’t ‘need’ most industry jobs any more than academic jobs. It’s just industry is better at generating wealth than academia, and so it has more money to pay employees.
> It’s just industry is better at generating wealth than academia
Ok... And almost by definition, that means that industry (and therefore industry jobs) is more useful to society. Because it is generating more wealth.
> ...that means that industry (and therefore industry jobs) is more useful to society. Because it is generating more wealth.
I feel that this is a rather narrow view, since there are a lot of companies who generate wealth by being detrimental to society at large (usually those who are just rent-seeking instead of continuously creating value).
They generate money which people can spend, so if that's the only criterion for wealth (it isn't), then mindlessly printing money is also useful to society (it isn't).
> The reality is that research type jobs are not that numerous for a reason... The reason why industry pays more is because that is what society needs.
That's clearly false. Industry/capitalism/profit-seeking by definition makes it incredibly difficult to do things where there isn't a large expected monetary return. But profitability is a poor proxy for whether a thing is useful to do or not.
For example, there are quite a few diseases/conditions that affect a decent number of people, but we don't find cures because the return on that investment would be too low, or often negative.
Capitalism suggests that the only thing that matters is having more money; I believe what truly matters is having better lives for everyone.
> Industry/capitalism/profit-seeking by definition makes it incredibly difficult to do things where there isn't a large expected monetary return. But profitability is a poor proxy for whether a thing is useful to do or not.
I don't think that's unique to capitalism. The Soviets were building spacecraft and nuclear weapons while people went without food.
Curing an extremely rare disease is valuable, we all value human life. But say there are tens of thousands of uncured diseases and more coming every year. Then let's say there is a finite number of people capable of working on them, how do you decide which cure we're going to target. The tradeoffs are a consequence of limited resources, not the system.
Market based health care does make me uncomfortable though, mainly because the incentives aren't in curing but in perpetual treatment to generate an income stream.
> Curing an extremely rare disease is valuable, we all value human life.
I think this is incorrect.
I think economic (and political) behaviour suggests rather strongly that we don't much value most other human life, nor value curing most extremely rare diseases.
> Then let's say there is a finite number of people capable of working on them, how do you decide which cure we're going to target. The tradeoffs are a consequence of limited resources, not the system.
That comes next, after there's a collective commitment to resource that finite number of people to work on uncured diseases of some kind.
At the moment, I think we're showing that the collective commitment is not in that direction.
We're doing other things instead, that you can certainly argue are of value, but given the large proportion of "earned income" most people and businesses have to spend on somebody else's "unearned income", I have to wonder if money flow is a good indicator of value.
I posit you make a greater contribution to society by earning as much as you can by utilizing your talents, then donating the excess when you don’t need it anymore.
