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: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @01:04AM (3 children)
Sports is entertainment. Whether entertainment is valuable is an involved philosophical question. If you say entertainment (including sports) is NOT valuable, then you'd have to also discount Beethoven, Bach, Stanley Kubrick, Rembrandt, etc.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday June 29 2017, @02:19AM
Personally, I think sports is NOT valuable, but (good) music and movies are. However, you can't deny the economic effects of both sports and bad music and movies. How much money have the Transformers movies made, and how many people did they provide a good living for, for instance?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 29 2017, @03:22AM
Just a reminder here that not so long ago in SoCal, For Rent signs had an addendum: No dogs and no actors.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 2) by fishybell on Thursday June 29 2017, @04:49AM
An addendum: I'm talking specifically about state college coaches here.
In almost every state in the United States the highest paid public employee (often by a million or more dollars) is the head coach of whatever sport is popular locally. Does paying the coach that much really help the team play better, and thus earn that much more money? Does diverting that money away from the college help society by that money?
Considering that college sports do make so much money for their college, I agree they should be paid well, but multiple millions of dollars in some cases? No. The athletes do the work for free, and they are the ones people show up and pay to see.