I do not consider professional athletes to bring anywhere near the "value" currently ascribed to them (lots of sports fans prefer college/amateur sports anyway)

I do not consider professional athletes to bring anywhere near the "value" currently ascribed to them (lots of sports fans prefer college/amateur sports anyway) but that is sort of beside the point: I never said to ignore people's relative strengths and weaknesses. Derek Jeter probably can't do [whatever it is you do] as well as you can — nor should he try if he's found his niche. You both are probably both examples of highly skilled workers, and there are also jobs which require less skill that nevertheless must be done. We could further argue that absolutely everybody has something in which they would be considered high-skilled if they realised it and developed their skills but even that is not really necessary for the thrust of my pre-counterargument which is that from the perspective of the entire society, all necessary work is roughly equally valuable regardless of whether it can be done by 1 or 999 people out of 1000 (or million). The second part of that pre-counterargument is the motivation for excellence. Personally I do not think that wealth[1] is really a factor for geniuses, most of whom seem to do stuff out of sheer joy of doing it. I'm willing to entertain a pre-counter-counterargument, but some historical analysis would be welcome. [1] Beyond a reasonable level of comfort and in a society which does not require you to hoard loot to ensure survival of progeny, and certainly not at the levels where you could not even conceivably spend it all.