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posted by martyb on Wednesday June 28 2017, @11:43PM   Printer-friendly
from the are-you-a-net-gain-or-a-net-drain? dept.

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.


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  • (Score: 2) by fishybell on Thursday June 29 2017, @04:49AM

    by fishybell (3156) on Thursday June 29 2017, @04:49AM (#532819)

    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.

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