[derefr]

> society does in fact value professional athletes on an individual basis more than doctors as they are paid far more

Yes, we value professional athletes more as people. However, we value the work of doctors more. In fact, the doctors themselves value the work more. That's why—like firefighters, or rescue workers, or police, or soldiers—they're willing to "burn their lives" (or risk their lives) to get the job done.

Micro-econ 101 isn't enough to explain this effect. You need an understanding of the desirability of jobs (and preference-functions that go into making jobs desirable), and how people are willing to trade off capturing less value as pay, for satisfying more of their other preferences.

You're right that professional athletes are paid employees of high-revenue corporations. Which is to say: they're paid a lot because 1. the corporation is getting a lot of benefit from their work, but 2. the athlete themselves is not getting much terminal-preference-satisfaction from the job itself, and so the athlete demands high monetary compensation for the work. (Compare: coal miners, oil-rig workers, etc. These people have risky jobs that they don't have any intrinsic desire to do; they're highly paid jobs because nobody would do the job if they weren't.) In the case of professional athletes, it's not quite that nobody would do the job, but rather that nobody with as much skill would do the job—the talent pool as a whole is large, but the top of the talent pool (the people everyone wants to see, and so the only valuable people from advertisers' perspectives) is small enough to create a seller's market for that talent.

Doctors, meanwhile, want the job (saving lives) to get done more than anyone else. That's often a large part of why they became doctors—because their preference-function ranks "saving lives" quite highly, so they will enjoy a little "saving lives" more than a large amount of something else. Thus, even though we as a society also value saving lives, we don't have to compensate doctors as much as professional athletes for doing it.

[wonderwonder]

I hear what you are saying but I think your argument is flawed. Very few professions burn lives, physical and mental well being to the level that professional sports do. Athletes in the martial sports very much put their lives at risk, even at the amateur level for essentially nothing knowing that most of them will not make it. These athletes train and risk their well being from an early age for the chance to 'go pro'. Also judging from the number of athletes busted for using PED's they are more than willing to risk their future health for current rewards as they love what they do.

I would also argue that while doctors do indeed want to help people, most of them would not go into the profession unless they were well compensated.

But the number of professional athlete jobs are limited enough that the only the best need apply while there are far more roles for doctors so you get a variety of skill levels and the market prices them as such.

Don't get me wrong I would much rather my money go to educating doctors to the maximum of their ability rather than paying to watch sports. I just don't think the based on the way pro athletes are praised and viewed that society feels the same way. Doctors have unfortunately become a commodity in much the same way as the police and fire departments or sanitation. But doctors have the distinction of working in a very much for profit industry so they are paid more than police, firemen etc. Society does indeed value the role they as a profession play overall more than they do sports but not as individuals but as a service.

[derefr]

> These athletes train and risk their well being from an early age for the chance to 'go pro'.

My understanding is that there isn't much overlap between the sports with the most highly-paid athletes, and the sports with the highest risk to long-term health. Martial athletes, or even participants in full-contact sports like American Football or Rugby, aren't nearly as well-paid as participants in sports like basketball, baseball, or soccer. Heck, e-sports "athletes" are highly paid as well, and there is next to no long-term health risk in what they do.

I'm not sure why this is true, but I'll hypothesize anyway: corporations don't want to invest in athletes who can't retire to a life of being a charismatic PR mouthpiece for said corporation. If you get permanent brain damage, your value as a spokesperson goes way down. So corporations don't tend to be as interested in those sports—at least, from the POV of sponsoring the athletes.

There's probably an interesting curve you can compute by summing up the "athlete sponsorship expenses" for a given sport, and then dividing it by sum of the expenses of other market-interest-correlated activities that said corporations engage in, like franchise merchandizing or sports video-game production. I would bet that, the more risky a sport is, the less they spend on branding the athletes, in proportion to how much they spend on branding the teams, the country's league as a whole, or the sport itself.

And certainly, kids want to be athletes, regardless of the risk. I would argue that 1. many kids choose this path long before they can accurately weigh the risks and rewards of a career path, and then 2. they get stuck in it, because they (and their parents) have invested so much effort into cultivating their talent in the sport. (It's not simply loss aversion, but more like being 1% of the way into cornering the market on a lottery drawing by buying all the tickets. If you stopped there, you almost certainly wouldn't win, and would just lose all the money you put in; but if you continue, there's a clear point at which winning becomes increasingly probable, so as long as you can continue down that path, you feel incentivized to do so.)

This still means, though, that when you interview the average olympic athlete (the people who have "won" this competition) and ask them what they do for fun... they don't have much to say. They've put everything into this one bet; they have no other talents or hobbies or passions, because they never had time to cultivate them.

> Society does indeed value the role they as a profession play overall more than they do sports but not as individuals but as a service.

Yes, correct, that's closer to what I meant than what I said myself. :) Look at it like buying a smartphone: just because there's huge demand for the product, doesn't mean the average worker at a Foxconn factory is getting rich.

The middle-man—the hospital, in this case—is satisfying the societal demand, and therefore is "getting rich"; the doctors, meanwhile, only get rich to the degree that they manage to negotiate better pay from the hospital. That negotiation is sometimes explicit, but is frequently implicit, with a kind of collective bargaining going on just by social-status moves of doctors as a group causing the salary-level which no doctor with their "pride" would accept, to go up and down. (You can tell that this is happening because of the existence of "free clinics." Voluntary work is different-in-kind, so it frequently crops up in industries where the workers are too prideful to ever work "for cheap." Without this pride, you wouldn't see "free clinics", but rather budget clinics.)

[betenoire]

By that reasoning, then we should give police, soldiers, and firemen those steroids instead