[c22]

It's kind of subjective to say this is better. If 100 million people had a bunch of cool image filter apps on their phone but no access to medical care the outcome is pretty clearly not better.

Perhaps it's more reasonable to say that providing a small amount of value to a larger amount of people is more profitable.

[ryanlol]

Luckily this isn’t a binary choice, the more profitable cool image filter app takes nothing away from healthcare.

The world is full of people who simply aren’t capable of providing “value” at scale. Odds are that society gets better outcomes when the few who can do so pursue things like silly image filter apps (and sometimes actually useful things too) over nursing careers.

[c22]

This may be true today, but it is a lot easier to build a silly image filter app now than it was 10 years ago. If the incentives remain skewed in favor of "highly distributed but small value" contributions to society while the difficulty of making such contributions also decreases we may, in fact, see a shortage of nurses.