[ryandvm]

If there's any lesson that sums up the way the world works, it is: people follow incentives

If you want folks to work on the cure for cancer or ending world hunger or curtailing climate change, then you're going to have to pay them enough to do it. The reality is that people have families, people have futures to think about, people have material desires. You can chastise them for making personal choices that prioritize their needs, but as long as a climatologist makes 1/10th of the salary of a software engineer at Google, that's not going to change.

Is happiness found in wealth? Not at all. But it's like fat and sugar, we are literally programmed to acquire resources. It was just that for most of human history, it wasn't actually possible to overdo it.

[voisin]

> You can chastise them for making personal choices that prioritize their needs, but as long as a climatologist makes 1/10th of the salary of a software engineer at Google, that's not going to change.

The issue is not that we aren’t willing to pay a climatologist 10x more. It is that companies like Google and Amazon and Facebook can lobby to continue to externalize costs and internalize profits that allow them to retain the ability to pay a software engineer 10x more than someone working for the common good. No one votes on this. It is entrenched in a broken system that is powered by money.

[disgruntledphd2]

It's not their lobbying that got them to where they are today. Both of those companies delivered tremendous value to many, many people, some of whom gave them tons of money in return.

I agree with you that the society we live in sucks in terms of delivering resources to the best products, but I personally, even after anything, wouldn't want to live without good search engines (i.e. Google).

Facebook I personally use less, but I know that so many people derive amazing value from it, and who am I to say they're wrong?