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Many jobs have spillover effects on the rest of society. For instance, the value of new treatments discovered by biomedical researchers is far greater than what they or their employers get paid, so they have positive spillovers. Other jobs have negative spillovers, such as those that generate pollution.
A forthcoming paper, by economists at UPenn and Yale,1 reports a survey of the economic literature on these spillover benefits for the 11 highest-earning professions.
There's very little literature, so all these estimates are very, very uncertain, and should be not be taken literally. But it's interesting reading.
Here are the bottom lines – see more detail on the estimates below. (Note that we already discussed an older version of this paper, but the estimates have been updated since then.)
(Emphasis in original retained.)
At the top, researchers who generate +$950,440 in positive externalities; at the bottom, financiers who generate -$104,000 in negative externalities. In a glaring omission, telephone sanitisers were not listed.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by MichaelDavidCrawford on Thursday June 29 2017, @12:05AM (14 children)
A friend of mine was a lab assistant at UC Berkeley. The best she could afford was a one-room apartment.
She asked me how she could make more money. I suggested coding. She took some classes, then got an internship at a startup. Quite soon she was offered a permanent position with stock options - founders' options.
It was not long at all before she bought a house in a nice neighborhood. In a little while she hired a contractor to build a second storey on her house.
Now she's a director of a successful company. She often travels to foreign lands to oversee their outsourcing.
Yes I Have No Bananas. [gofundme.com]
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @12:17AM (2 children)
"Now she's a director of a successful company. She often travels to foreign lands to oversee their outsourcing."
She made it, so fuck everyone around her trying to make it here now.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @01:46AM
Not everyone can code, yadda yadda, automate away tons of jobs, bippitty bop, we have the lowclass jobless and the elite employables. Stratify society yeah!!! Keep a history long enough and you can start learning from it.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday June 29 2017, @02:16AM
No, she was really lucky, and probably also very talented and would have done a good job in any field she entered. But the point of the OP's anecdote, I'm sure, was that the biology field was a financial dead-end for her, whereas coding was the ticket to big success.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @01:50AM (9 children)
I'm in that situation and know many other people that are leaving the field.
Four years of undergrad and six years for a PhD and what we're qualified for are $40,000/year "training positions" as postdoctoral researchers with no job security. Because there are already ~35,000 biomedical postdoctoral researchers (with an average of six years experience), the job market is saturated.
Getting a non-science job that pays well and donating money to EA charities seems like it is the best option to make the world better.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @12:56PM (8 children)
Ever think that is because most of the "training" is actually learning incorrect stuff, ie a waste of time? The post-doc salary actually is close to reflecting the true value of the average biomed project. It is probably 2x too high if anything.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @03:59PM (7 children)
Depends on your definition of "true value".
Relative to the value cited in TFA, postdocs are underpaid.
Market prices set the value of industry postdocs higher than academic postdocs and industry prefers those with postdoctoral experience over those without it.
There is a societal cost for highly educated people being underemployed.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @05:25PM (6 children)
The healthcare market is propped up by FDA approval (do NHST twice and see an effect at least as large as the current standard) acting as a proxy for "a treatment works" though. Many people still don't realize the danger they are put in by accepting these treatments. You will still see people who clamor to take part in clinical trials and be first in line to get injected with newly synthesized chemicals!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @08:13PM (5 children)
Well, ~90% of drugs fail to get approval going through clinical trials.
If you think you can hack the statistics to get a better approval rate, then you should pursue a very lucrative career in the drug industry (or as an investor). The industry is either more ethical than you think, incompetent in their ability to hack statistics, or the current standard is working. The effectiveness of treatments is never really known until they are used for large groups of patients, but demonstrated effectiveness in Phase III trials increases the likelihood that treatments will be effective for other patients.
http://blogs.sciencemag.org/pipeline/archives/2016/06/02/are-things-getting-any-better-in-the-clinic [sciencemag.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @09:10PM (4 children)
I do in fact think that, and no I don't want to help to scam people about their health. Also, the 90% rejection rate is something that is chosen by choosing alpha = 0.05, or 0.01 or whatever it is these days along with other criteria. It will fluctuate from year to year but overall you will see that rate maintained unless there is political pressure to change it.
As the submitters get better at "hacking" the criteria you will see that alpha gets more stringent, and they start looking harder at methodological issues, side effects, etc to maintain the 90% rejection rate.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @09:38PM (3 children)
Fine, then use your power for good: analyze clinical trial data, predict what will be effective, then make money investing. The excess money can be donated to effective altruism charities.
The rejection rate is not chosen by the FDA. The FDA would love to have a 100% approval rate as long as the drugs demonstrated effectiveness.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Effective_altruism [wikipedia.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @10:12PM (2 children)
No, they really wouldn't. It isn't that 90% is special, it is that deviations from the usual lead to questions being asked of the administrators: "Are you saying the last guy sucked at his job because people under him approved too many/few new treatments?" Then you make political adversaries. Btw, I didn't come up with this idea on my own, I was told it.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @10:30PM (1 child)
Well, I'll tell you differently: there is not a vast conspiracy at the FDA that is keeping good therapies off the market. There has also been a lot of political pressure to eliminate the requirement to show efficacy.
You might not believe me, but how about an appeal to simple logic: Do you honestly believe that drug companies with billions of dollars on the line would sit on their hands and let the FDA arbitrarily deny them approvals?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @10:50PM
I didn't describe a conspiracy. I described an incentive system that encourages a certain outcome. I also don't think drug companies are sitting on their hands, or that the denials are arbitrary (although you surely agree that, eg, alpha = 0.05 in 2 trials involves two arbitrary numbers). So your most recent post has nothing to do with my claims.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @03:11AM
He was a lab assistant (chemistry).
He got himself a new gig.
Now he has cool threads, cool digs, and a cool car. [google.com]
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