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How much people earn is not the only test of the quality of their education.

• deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
• timothychung 18y ago
  The value that people deliver to the world should be a good determinant. :-)
  • quizbiz 18y ago
    How do you suppose one would measure "value"?
    • evgen 18y ago
      I believe the answer implied was "the market"...
    • newt0311 18y ago
      By how much they earn. A firm pays their employees in proportion to their contribution (at least on average -- as that is efficient behavior). A firm is paid by customers in proportion to their value contribution. And on and on. Econ 101 of supply, demand, and price signals (one of the few parts that actually works).
    • timothychung 18y ago
      Value is defined in many levels. The easiest definition for everyone should be the value they can think for themselves. For a country, most economists would consider GDP. For me, I would consider sustainability and happiness.
  • derefr 18y ago
    Prostitutes deliver huge amounts of value with no education required at all. I'm not sure if that's for or against your point--I've never studied economics--but it seems damning of something. ;)
    • azanar 18y ago
      The positive value that prostitutes deliver to the world is very fleeting. An orgasm lasts at most several seconds. After a few days, the average male will be jonesing again. The long term value production of the average prostitute strikes me as damn near zero, unless the outlet prevents the john from sexually assaulting someone else. I agree, though, that the short term value can be quite high, and I think that is what people pay for. It seems to me that value delivered to a sufficiently large audience would have to be of the long-term variety, because otherwise it wouldn't last long enough to get sufficiently dispersed. It's possible something might contradict that assertion, but I can't think of any examples right now.
      • Eliezer 18y ago
        You might as well claim that the value delivered by restaurants is fleeting.
        • cousin_it 18y ago
          Right, but you didn't pick the best example. After all, people need to eat to survive, and survival is a long-term value. I'd mention the whole entertainment industry :-)
          • jrp 18y ago
            The main point of "eating out" is not nourishment.
        • azanar 18y ago
          Ok, I will. The value of restaurants is fleeting. Here's why: The value derived from an individual from a restaurant is food, and perhaps being in a pleasing ambient environment for a short while. They derive value from the environment only while they are there, and from the food for the next day or so. After that, no more value unless you think he might have died otherwise, in which case he gained long term value in still being alive. The deal with restaurants is that they continuously deliver short term value to a stream of people who, hopefully, come back again and again. The value of an individual meal is fleeting, but they're willing to provide that value again and again. My point is not to confuse a steady stream of short term value with a discrete instance of long-term value. I can use a well-built chainsaw for far longer than I can use a New York strip steak from a high class restaurant. Maybe you and I are discussing value from different perspectives though, but I'm not arguing that short-term value is a lesser degree than long term value. I'm just arguing that they aren't the same.
• motoko 18y ago
  True, but it's the easiest to measure, and so it is.
• saikat 18y ago
  Additionally, I've found that the smartest people who go to prestigious schools care more about prestige and interesting work than about salary. The best CS and math students at Harvard wanted to be professors or do research. It was the average Harvard students, for the most part, that went to finance or consulting to make the big bucks. PG made a point (I think in one of his essays that I can't remember - correct me if I am wrong) that I've found to be fairly true (though of course not always) - that often, jobs for a given level of qualification have a set wealth they will pay, and this payout can come in the form of a more interesting job or more money. This generalization does have a subtlety though - when you are a higher valued candidate for work, you are not only offered more wealth but a greater diversity of choices of work that offer different proportions of interest vs. money. Essentially what I mean here is that it is much easier, coming out of Harvard, to get a high paying job than it is to get a really interesting job. When you are in the middle rungs of math at Harvard, it is not that hard to get a job as an I-banker (lots of money, but two years of very boring work), but you can't just trade off some of that money for a more interesting job. It is only when you are smarter that you get the option of having either the high paying I-banking job or a lower paying job that is more interesting (i.e. cutting edge grad school work at MIT's AI lab). A lot of the smartest people want this more interesting job not only because they are driven more by their interests than money, but also because these jobs are more prestigious since only the smartest people can have them. On top of this, I knew a lot more people from Harvard who were willing to forgo making much money in their earlier life by taking travel grants or just going off to some country to make some documentary or doing a startup (something that I think has a much lower total expected outcome of income than a finance job). A lot of the smarter people were willing to sacrifice money for freedom because they were sure they would probably eventually make enough money to survive (and the degree helped this), and freedom was just more important to them. Given all this, measuring money in these studies doesn't even seem good enough to me to be a heuristic for success. People at the most prestigious universities seem to often have the freedom and luxury to have different priorities and to simply not care as much about money. It seems like even a study asking people about their job satisfaction some number of years later would be better.