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, @04:24PM (1 child)
A single payer system is essentially mandatory insurance.
Nobody chooses to be sick. So requiring the individual to pay won't really reduce the use of the system.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Friday June 30 2017, @12:33AM
The point of a health care system isn't to force people to pay to be sick.
The individual would make choices about what's important to them as opposed to a one-size-fits-all system that uses other peoples' money. If health care is really important to them, then they can spend more of their personal wealth on that. If it's not, then they can spend less.