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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: 2) by urza9814 on Thursday June 29 2017, @01:11PM
Not to mention the positive economic and societal benefits of keeping such people quarantined far away from any normal human habitation for the duration of the show...