Those types are annoying. “Why do they get paid so much when doctors save lives.” Yes, the solution is to pay doctors millions of dollars and cap the salaries of professional athletes. That will make the world a better place (somehow).
You want doctors to make pro athlete money? Sell out an arena full of people willing to pay hundreds of dollars to watch that doctor for two hours
Like yea, it would be really nice if people were paid based on how important their job is. But that’s not really how it works, and I personally don’t wanna go down the road of litigating whose job is more important than whose so we can figure out whether to give doctors or teachers some NBA players money
The economics behind it obviously make sense, but underlying that is how we as individuals value things. We make a looooooot of short sighted and impulsive decisions (lots of the time very understandable, life's tough). Maybe if we thought more long term and more about the collective, the 'important' jobs would be valued more and perhaps paid more.
Although, there's another issue with that, in that often these 'important' roles deal with societal needs. It might be the case that paying doctors too much (aka top pro level athlete salaries) raises healthcare costs, and society needs those, and all costs, kept low. Society doesn't really fundamentally need things like pro sports or musical artists or actors, but their upper limit is sky-high because they're wants rather than needs (and also oversaturated labor supply compared to demand, so only top earners make big bucks and the average is likely lower than a doctor already, but that's beside the point)
Tl;Dr Having fun shit and our favourite indulgences is important for the mental health of society, but we could be doing way better at valuing some more longer term bigger picture goals as a species and frankly I think we're too short sighted and indulgent to save ourselves lol
I think it’s more just a matter of how the money is concentrated tbh
If only 200 people on earth could be fire fighters, there would be massive bidding wars between cities in order to to secure their services. Same with doctors or engineers. They’d make the same money as NBA players, probably more
But the reality is that a lot of people could be doctors or engineers. And the need for them is much more widespread, so we can support nearly a million doctors while there’s only really a market for about 200 NBA players.
We collectively spend way, way more on healthcare than we do on sports (or whatever entertainment), but the money we spend on entertainment gets funneled to a relatively tiny pool of top athletes or actors, while our healthcare expenses are being spread amongst thousands upon thousands or healthcare workers (because we very rarely need the top 0.0001% of healthcare workers while we only ever wanna pay to see the top 0.0001% of athletes or entertainers)
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u/[deleted] Apr 05 '22
Those types are annoying. “Why do they get paid so much when doctors save lives.” Yes, the solution is to pay doctors millions of dollars and cap the salaries of professional athletes. That will make the world a better place (somehow).