What Are Jobs Worth
The BBC reports on a recent study that looked at the value of different professions to the society as a whole.
Hospital cleaners are worth more to society than bankers, a study suggests.
The research, carried out by think tank the New Economics Foundation, says hospital cleaners create £10 of value for every £1 they are paid.
It claims bankers are a drain on the country because of the damage they caused to the global economy.
They reportedly destroy £7 of value for every £1 they earn. Meanwhile, senior advertising executives are said to “create stress”.
Bankers add no value to commerce, they are middlemen. They extract a “rent” from commerce for moving money. The money belongs to depositors, not the banks. They provide a needed service, but that service has been given a primacy that it simply doesn’t deserve.
The entire TARP debacle shows that financial institutions are only interested in their profits, and could care less about society. The people claiming that the institutions that took TARP funds are paying them back forget about the part of the program that is even more important – the government guarantees that taxpayers will cover any losses. It would be reasonable that any financial institution that pays back the TARP funds should be removed from the guarantees pool. If they are so healthy, they don’t need guarantees.
2 comments
About time someone did this study. I notice the omission of ‘Politicians’ in the study however. I am certain a study would show that politicians rank about at least the same or higher than bankers in terms of waste, societal drain, and environmental damage. There are a hell of a lot of useless politicians around, when you count local, state and federal politicians.
If we eliminated politicians, bankers, lawyers and marketers, there may well be a hundred-fold increase in value to society in almost every area, including a significant reduction on population strain on Earth’s resources. It would solve so many pressing problems! 😈
It’s a win-win scenario really. 😀 I’ll sleep much better tonight!
Sadly… reality will return to bite in the morning on this Bizzaro World we live on, where the people who actually do have value think they don’t, and the people who have no value think they do. What an insane World. Oh well…
Politicians are carried as a necessary expense, like sewage fees, so no one expects them to be productive, but we have twice as many chambers as we need in our legislative branch, It is well past the time when out version of the “House of Lords” needs to be retired from active participation.
Alas, that requires them to vote themselves out of existence with a Constitutional amendment, and that will never happen.