Never heard of them? Who did they play for??
You seem to be laboring under the misconception that if one reads Rand that this would be the sum total of their reading experience. Let me assure you, reading Rand is not mutually exclusive to reading OTHER authors works.
-XT
Something is astray because of the fact that more people give money to athletes than teachers…
… which is wrong because…
… it’s wrong for people to give more money to athletes than teachers…
… which is wrong because…
… (turtles all the way down ad infinitum perpetual circular definition infinite regress…)
The collective resources of Pfizer, the worlds largest research-based pharma company, has created over $57 billion in equity, directly employes over 80,000 people and created who knows how many products that help millions of people. So how much does the guy who runs it deserve to make?
I hear this analogy so much and it is so off the mark. Teachers are not entertainers. You could just have easily said the 2 events are a Harvard educated teacher is about to lecture on physics, and Derek Jeter will speak on quantum mechanics. Which event will impart more knowledge? Unfair analogy?
And this is the crux of the matter. Comparing different sorts of livelihoods.
Derek Jeter entertains me. My doctor extends my life. He should get more money because living is more important than being entertained.
But somehow, “entertaining” has become more important than all else. Why?
Because it got linked in with advertising. A marriage that in retrospect ought never to have been allowed.
Because it’s human nature…humans would rather be entertained (to take their minds off of other things) than healthy. They would rather eat foods that are bad for them than eat healthy food that doesn’t taste good. They would rather smoke and drink than constantly exercise.
To me, this whole thread is ridiculous and based on a counter intuitive concept of how humans operate. People don’t ‘give’ their money to entertainers…they spend their money on what they WANT to spend it on, which includes watching sports games on TV and live.
There is absolutely nothing wrong or even unusual about this. You and the OP are free to spend your money as you choose. I’d be shocked if either of you hasn’t gone to see a movie at a theater, gone to a rock concert, watched a sports game on TV, bought a music CD or movie on DvD, etc etc.
Where do you get this from? Did a medieval bard make more or less than a medieval doctor? A blacksmith? How did advertising impact this?
-XT
“More important” has very little do with compensation because if it did, babysitters would be paid more than any other trade profession making house calls such as electricians, plumbers, insurance inspectors, fireman, etc.
Entertainment has not become more important. It simply has become more of a money magnet.
Water is more important soda and yet people (probably you included) pay more for 16-ounces of Coke or Pepsi than 16-ounces of water (not talking about “bottled” water.)
Water costs about 1 cent per gallon. The ink in inkjet printers costs $8,000 per gallon. Is water more important than ink? Most of the 6 billion people would probably say yes. But “importance” is not the primary factor in determining price.
Disconnect the level of “importance” from the level of “compensation.”
Most people already make this disconnection (at least in a microeconomic sense) but they just don’t realize it. I know they make this disconnection because I don’t know of any parent paying a babysitter $75/hour!
… different jobs…but you pay them both with the same green dollar bills.
No offense, but who are you? Jeter and the Yankees entertain millions while your economic contribution to society is likely minimal. Probably whatever labor some employer can eek out of you at whatever market wage your skills earn.
In your economy, yes, your personal wellbeing is more important than being entertained. Therefore when presented with a choice of how to spend the fruits of your labor, you will spend it on healthcare instead of seasons tickets.
In your doctors economy, he earns a living based on how many people like you he can treat.
Jeter, OTOH, has a skill that millions of people want to see.
Isn’t this issue of athletes and entertainers vs. other professions primarily about how many people a single athlete can “provide a service to” at once? Two basketball teams (10 people total) can entertain millions of people through the power of television. If a single doctor could treat millions of people per year himself, I bet you he would be richer than an entertainer. Likewise, if a single teacher could effectively teach millions at once then she could rake in the cash as well.
The fact is, the existence of stadiums and media such as film and television allow only a few entertainers to entertain millions with essentially no additional effort on their part (compared to if they were entertaining to just a small audience).
Entertainment figures can make bucketloads of money because it’s a winner-take-all market. The world’s best stand-up comedian can have his own TV show; the world’s 1000th best comedian is an unknown trying to scrape by in comedy clubs.
By comparison teaching can’t be scaled up indefinitely under the current classroom-based system (although see www.academicearth.org), and teacher’s unions prevent “good teachers” from getting paid more than their perfunctory counterparts.
How many times are you going to trot out that $75 babysitter argument? And wheredid you find a plumber for $31 an hour?
Now let’s talk Pfiser. Who should make the money? You say the guy “runs” the place. I say the people who invented the drugs and actually produced something.
Nowadays I’m disabled but there was a time where I ran a very successful company with sales of about 150 million a year. I get supply and demand. I understand who gets what in our society. You say it works fine. Money is the be all and the end all.
My point, which I guess you’re not going to understand is that a society that values a shortstop, even one I love, more than a physician is deeply flawed.
NOW PLEASE END THIS THREAD
Until you or someone eloquently explains why “importance” of person’s tasks in relation to pay does not jive with a babysitter’s important tasks in relation to pay.
Both you and BwanaBob have not answered this. Go ahead and think it out; see if you can come up with a logical reason.
And what you don’t seem to understand is that the flawed society will value the trivial “bread & circuses” more than a physician regardless of what economic system you have in place. Free market, communism, church and monarchy, Roman empire. Doesn’t matter.
Even in the Russia’s communist country, the Olympic athletes were given special privileges, apartments, etc above and beyond the rest of the everyday citizens. “To each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.” — yes, of course, unless you’re exempted by being a government bureaucrat, international chess champion, or Olympic gymnast / hockey player.
Now 1000 years ago in China, education and teachers were held in the highest regard. Higher than the merchants (businessmen). The big brass ring to shoot for was passing the Imperial Examination. School was the be-all-end-all.
The USA is not the China of 1000 years ago. The foundational fabric of the USA is simply not set up (currently) to highly value teachers. This status may change and the “free market” may actually be one of the motivators. As more citizens realize that mastering complex “knowledge work” is the best chance at survival in a global marketplace, this situation could self-correct itself.
You can’t expect to ask a question and end the thread at the same time!
Who should decide what is “valued” in a society?
From what I know of them there (as others have said) are no functioning, wealthy democracies with true free markets. And there is a reason for that. It is much easier to make a profit via monopolies and dumping costs onto others (via pollution for example). So there are no free markets, they’d invariably end up plutocratic with no long term incentives.
Either way, it is our fault and not the market’s fault that entertainers make so much money. If you go to CalTech and you gave the students a chance to hear Edward Witten speak or to hear Paris Hilton speak, chances are 99% will pick Witten even if he charges more.
Athletes in sports that people do not care about (polo, as an example) aren’t going to make the income of people in sports people love like baseball, basketball or football. People who compete professionally in the world’s strongest man competitions make peanuts and most have jobs outside of those sports. one is a chicken farmer, another a cop, another a CEO, another a college student, etc. The dedication it takes to become a worlds strongest man competitor is just as big as the dedication to become a professional baseball player. But society values baseball more so the players get more.
The fact that we are a status obsessed, consumerist, materialist culture that loves bread and circuses is why entertainers (the 1% who are exceptional, not the other 99%) are paid so well. The other 99% barely seem to get by.
You and others keep saying this, as if somehow our ‘culture’ has changed, and things used to be different in the old days…or something. The fact is, we have ALWAYS been a status obsessed species, who places value seemingly arbitrarily. Entertainers, especially the really good ones, have always been at a premium by society.
The only difference is where that arbitrary placement of value is today, compared to where it was a hundred years ago…or a thousand. Or ten thousand. Or a hundred thousand. Well…the other ‘only’ difference is simply how wealthy our species is today, in absolute terms, compared to in the past, which means we have more to give to what we arbitrarily place value on than our ancestors.
-XT
While it may be true we have always been status driven it is also true that 50 years ago we were much less dollar driven. There may be more to consume but we have become gluttons in our pursuit of meaningless crap.
No questions, a statement. If you choose to worship at the alter of the dollar and have no social conscience free markets work just fine. Otherwise not so much.
Either way have a Merry Xmas or Happy Holidays!
AND TO ALL A GOOD NIGHT
What do you base this incredible statement on? Do you realize that whole cultures have been destroyed in the pursuit of, say, gold? It’s just a worthless metal who’s sole value (in the past at least) was simply in how shinny it was, and how pretty it looked. Humans are no more driven by status or greed than they were 10,000 years ago…there is simply a lot more wealth available to the majority of humans today than there ever was in the past.
Which ought to tell you something right there…
What is ‘meaningless crap’ to one depends on ones tastes and preference. Perhaps what you consider ‘meaningless crap’ I consider to be of value…and vice versa. Personally, I think that the ‘pursuit of meaningless crap’ has brought the majority of humanity to the highest standard of living humanity has ever known. To me, that’s a worthwhile thing, in and of itself…but then, my history viewing glasses don’t have the same rose colored tint that yours apparently do…
You keep saying this, and yet you keep posting things for people to respond too. Basically, if you don’t want to discuss this stuff anymore then don’t keep coming back to the thread. Obviously you didn’t get the answers you expected. You are the OP, however, so you could always petition a Mod to close the thread, if you don’t want to hear anymore about on the subject.
-XT
Look I base my opinion on what I’ve seen over the last 50 years. You think the pursuit of crap is wonderful. I get it, I just don’t agree.
I shouldn’t have started this thread. I am truly sorry I did. Now would you please just let it die?
To those who claim that we value entertainers more than doctors, I only have this to say: no we don’t.
Or to put it another way, how much do you spend every year on medical care and medical insurance and taxes to support government health care?
I know at my job my employer pays $976.88 per month for medical insurance for me and my family. And if my employer wasn’t paying that insurance, I’d have to do it myself. If they didn’t pay for it, I could get a $1000 a month raise, but I’d have to pay more than that to insure my family, unless I could get into some government subsidized program and shift the costs onto the taxpayers.
I can guarantee you that I don’t spend a thousand dollars a month on entertainment. And I don’t think I’m atypical. Does an average person spend more per month on entertainment or medical coverage? Since we spend a lot more as a country on medical care than we do on entertainment it’s ridiculous to say that we value entertainers more than doctors.
As has been pointed out, due to mass media exceptional entertainers can reach a much larger customer base than a doctor. Even the best doctor can only see so many patients in a year, can only perform so many procedures in a year. Some doctors become millionaires due to their specialized skills, but most only make a decent upper-middle class salary.
But the average entertainer makes far less. The average entertainer makes a few thousand dollars a year. The average entertainer can’t support themselves by entertaining others, and has to have a second job to pay the bills. That’s because we don’t value entertainers much in our society.
But a consider an average comedian in an average nightclub, where you pay a $5 cover charge. How many people can that average guy entertain? 50? If each of them pays $5, that’s only $250, and the house takes most of that money. Now imagine a pretty good comedian. Except this guy is on TV, and instead of 50 people watching you have 5 million. If that guy got paid at the same rate as the average comedian above, he’d split $25 million with the TV industry for one night of work.
See how that works? If we value the work the same–comedians get paid $5 per viewer–the guy who performs thursday night at the coffee shop should get paid a lot less than the guy who fills a concert hall, right? Doesn’t it make sense for the guy who sells a thousand tickets to make 100 times the money as the guy who sells 10 tickets?
Entertainment, due to modern technology, is a field with unusual economies of scale. The marginal cost of adding one more viewer, or one more ticket is very low. The same is not true for performing appendectomies, or building houses, or teaching a child.
If I pay $1000/month for private tutoring for my child for an hour every day after school, I really value education, right? I’m paying the tutor $33/hour. But how many kids can that private tutor see each day? Two or three, tops. So they max out at $33,000 a year. But what if via some miracle that same tutor could teach dozens or hundreds of kids at once? They could make more money even while charging much much less. Except that squeezes out the mediocre tutors, because no one will pay $1000/month for mediocre one-on-one tutoring when they can get better tutoring for less on the interweb.
Notice how nobody pays for live musicians to come to their home and play “Rhapsody in Blue” when they’re in the mood? Instead they turn on the CD player, or iTunes? And they spend much much LESS for entertainment than they did in the days before mass media. Being a musician used to be steady work back in the days before recordings. If you wanted music at an event, you paid for musicians to show up and play. Nowadays you can play recorded music, which means the economics of the music industry have changed radically, favoring the very top notch musicians who make big money, while the mediocre journeymen musicians wait tables to pay the bills.
If one musician sells a million CDs at $14 a pop, while another sells 1000 at $14 a pop, is it fair for them both to make the same amount of money? Or is it fair for the guy who sold a million CDs to make a thousand times more than the guy who sold a thousand CDs? Hint: 1,000,000/1,000=1,000.
It’s pretty obviously that the problem here is you DON’T get it…and, sadly, you don’t seem to want to even try to grasp what people are telling you. And this from a truly diverse group of posters who run the gamut of political ideologies. That alone should tell you something right there.
I’m unsure why you DID start the thread, since you seemingly don’t want to debate anything…simply assert. As for letting the thread die, the best way to do that is to stop posting. It’s going to continue on as long as folks still have something to say, and you coming in with drive by assertions is guaranteed to keep it coasting along for a few more pages, if nothing else.
-XT
When did I say it was new and that people didn’t engage in status worship in the past?