SoylentNews

Phoenix666 [soylentnews.org] writes:

Many jobs have spillover effects on the rest of society [80000hours.org]. 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 [soylentnews.org] reports a survey of the economic literature on these spillover benefits for the 11 highest-earning professions. [80000hours.org]

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 [80000hours.org] of this paper, but the estimates have been updated since then.)

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 [wikia.com] were not listed.

Original Submission