it is interesting to think about, but this analysis leaves out too much useful work to draw any meaningful conclusions from. as you point out, raising and carin

it is interesting to think about, but this analysis leaves out too much useful work to draw any meaningful conclusions from. as you point out, raising and caring for children is important work that is mostly uncompensated. the quality of care is also important (doing a bad job at it can easily be a net negative contribution) and hard to measure. there's also the issue that compensation doesn't actually track contributions to society very well. I build things at huge scale that are at least somewhat useful. I now make about 10x what I made heating up $2 slices of pizza, which seems about right. but I could get paid the same or possibly more to optimize ad clickthrough, which doesn't seem quite right. a lot of money gets spent on trying to win red queen races. I don't really fault the individuals involved for following the local incentive gradient, but they're essentially getting paid to break each other's windows and then fix them. there's no net value there.