Comment by mmooss
2 hours ago
> A person paid to do child care in an organization with overhead, who has to pay taxes, etc. is not productive enough
They are highly productive but the market doesn't value them. It values the backup forward on a basketball team - an almost completely non-productive job - more than a doctor. It values the owner of a company at $1 trillion, which is obviously absurd.
It's not "absurd"... you're confusing moral value with economic scale.
A $1T founder is rewarded for building a massive system that employs hundreds of thousands of people, moved technological progress forward dramatically, and has positively affected the lives millions.
A doctor provides life-saving care, but they are physically limited to helping one person at a time. A backup NBA forward might not save lives, but their work is broadcast and monetized across millions of screens at once.
Arguing that entertainment is "non-productive" ignores human nature. People gladly pay to be entertained. If sports have no value, do you feel the same way about books, art, and movies?
To get to the Baumol effect, the movie actor can perform once and be seen by millions whereas the theater actor has to perform at least once a night in front of one roomful of people. So the former can get paid more, a lot more.
Probably the highest paid athletes in the world are european soccer players and the thing there is that these salaries can be justified in terms of the value top players bring in a game where being relegated can bring the money train for a team to a halt. You don't see working-class soccer fans complaining about this (they feel the value!) but the owners and many representatives of capital get fuming mad about it.
(Funny, growing up in youth soccer in the US taught me to think of the game as an exercise in Brownian motion where there are too many people on the field who aren't held accountable. It wasn't until I had an argument with a recommender system that couldn't accept that I hated soccer that changed my mind and turned me into one of those sports fans who rolls out of bed Saturday mornings to watch the Premier League that I realized how high the stakes are in the European game.)