Discover more from Overcoming Bias
A student told me the other day he wanted to be a doctor, so he could help people. I thought, "What, as opposed to the rest of us who hurt people?" Contrary to the smug self-righteousness assumptions of those in "helping" professions, like child care, teaching, counseling, or emergency services, it is far from obvious that these professions are any more helpful than the rest.
Yes, if you choose to be a doctor, you will spend your time providing services that people perceive to have value, sometimes enormous value. However, you cannot take full credit for this value:
You charge a price for your services, so the help they receive is the difference between the value they gain and the price you charge. The more you charge the less help is gained, and doctors charge a lot.
If there are a fixed number of slots in medical school, you would just displace someone else. You then have to ask how much better are your services than that person’s. And beware of overconfidence.
If there are not a fixed number of slots, then by becoming a doctor you induce between zero and one more doctor’s worth of patients to be treated. But these are marginal, not average, cases; these patients thought their case so mild that they were right on the borderline of not going to a doctor at all. So you only get to take credit for the value these marginal patients get, not the average patient.
Customers might overestimate the value they get from your services. Yes, your colleagues might say that people tend to underestimate the value of your service, but they are probably biased. In fact, the marginal patient seems to get zero health value from medical services.
Part of the value you provide may be relative social status. By teaching, you might help some students look better to employers than others. By doctoring, you may help some show they care about their family more than others. If so, you are helping some by hurting others. Shame on you.
You may really want a helping job so that you can feel and look morally superior to those in non-helping professions. If so, you gain value at the expense of others who look worse; shame on you again.
By participating in a society we all help each other. The amount you are paid is a (low) estimate of the value others place on your services. This estimate may have biases, but beware of too quickly assuming you know what that bias is.
Do Helping Professions Help More?
"Do you have a real example of a rich person who provides no value to society?"
Paris Hilton. And she's just one of a very large number of that sort who are less well known.
Large parts of one society think MIC is a good, but larger parts of other societies think the MIC of the first society is a bad. For the sum of military endeavors, it's a sheer waste.
Part of the problem seems to be an equivocation on "society." Does it mean human society or one particular society? Since the discussion was about "helping people" I think the first is the correct context.
Many people would disagree that MIC is a waste. Chances are, they'd calculate from that standpoint of their own society, which is cheating.
Does the same possibility exist for making money when it does no good for one particular country? There's where an unnecessary level of complexity is introduced. Do wealthy civil lawyers, for example, make a contribution to society where they're involved in a sheer tug of war? The question is controversial because you have to take into account the externalities provided by a development of the law. But the MIC example seems to me a precise example of where people get enriched without doing good. The fact that they can get many to believe they are doing good shouldn't confuse.