Off Topic — HabitableZone

Off Topic » in reply to if *Your* house was on fire...

re: if *Your* house was on fire...
Larry J — (archived)

I've read that there are over a million professional firefighters in the United States. There are untold thousands more who are volunteers. Any job, no matter how important (and firefighters, police officers, teachers, etc. do have very important jobs) that so many people can do is likely to have very high salaries. It's that old supply and demand thingee again. Damned inconsiderate, those economists.

By way of comparison, there are only a few thousand major league professional athletes in the US, and not all of them pull in the big bucks, nor do they do it for long. The same applies to actors and musicians. In the big scheme of things, Americans spend several billion dollars on sports and other forms of entertainment each year (don't know the total, but I'd guess its somewhere around $30-50 billion). By way of comparison, we spend over $500 billion on education (combined federal, state, and local). The money spent on entertainment is dwarfed by the money spent on education, but it's spread among a much smaller number of people. The same goes for essential things like firefighters and the police.

Just as your house is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it, a job's monetary worth to society is what people are willing to pay.

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