I quibble with your quibble. This article does conflate economic return with actual value. Many people contribute positively to society (including economically)

I quibble with your quibble. This article does conflate economic return with actual value. Many people contribute positively to society (including economically), without necessarily being directly compensated proportionally to their contribution. For example, I am an engineer at a research institute that does a substantial amount of cancer and other medical research. As a CS guy, I get a pretty nice salary. However, there are plenty of folks who I work with whose degrees came from liberal arts education who contribute more directly to the cancer research, but whose salaries are lower than mine. Much of this research might actually go on to make pharmaceutical companies substantial profits, but these people will not be directly or proportionally compensated for that. If some of the research does not translate to therapeutics, then they will not have increased economic value at all, but will have definitely added intellectual and scientific value - a value that is not really easy to measure on a simple economic scale --- and certainly not on one so simple-minded as the one used in the article.