SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
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.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Thursday June 29 2017, @12:43PM
For example, biomedical researchers' externalities are based on the public's alleged willingness to pay for better medical research, while financiers' externalities are based on fees for investing. If we were to make a proper comparison, we would either have to note the public's obvious willingness to pay financiers for their services - even when the services are well below market rate (which probably will make the financier have a strong "positive externality") or we would have to note other researcher costs like lab and administration overhead and the high percentage of irreproducible research that is generated (the combination may be enough to turn the latter into "negative externality" territory as well).