[rjzzleep]

It just tells you how broken the understanding of value in current society really is.

When someone posting videos of themselves testing lipstick or 10 dollar dresses makes more money than dozens highly trained real engineers that build physical goods necessary for the betterment of society and the world as a whole, it does in fact explain, to some extent, why we have a child book author running the entirety of hard work of generations of people that built the German industry into the ground.

[BoorishBears]

What you're doing is kind of like claiming society values Powerball winners over engineers because Powerball winners make more money.

> When someone posting videos of themselves testing lipstick or 10 dollar dresses makes more money than dozens highly trained real engineers that build physical goods necessary for the betterment of society and the world as a whole

Some people who do that almost every single day for years eventually work up to that. For every one person who reaches that mark as an influencer there are 1000 more who do that work and make... zilch. It's like winning the lottery with a little bit of agency sprinkled in.

Equity is a thing, but I don't know many engineers working for zero dollars on the hope that one day maybe they'll get lucky and become one of the minority of engineers who make any money...

-

Also:

> why we have a child book author running the entirety of hard work of generations of people that built the German industry into the ground.

huh?

[jrochkind1]

Very very few "influencers" make more money than engineers.

("Engineers"... when software engineers largely working on advertising and smoothing commerce to sell people garbage they don't need make more money than most "real engineers that build physical goods necessary for the betterment of society"... yeah, it's not just about the influencers, we can look in the mirror, the majority (although not all) of software engineers making mid-six-figures are probably working on selling people crap one way or another, not making anything necessary for the "betterment of society")

But yeah, the vast majority of "influencers" are hustling and struggling and dreaming of being the very succesful 1% while in fact barely making enough to get by. Which seems to me important to talk about when we start talking about "influencers" as as a class or career. There are a tiny portion of "influencers" who get mega-wealthy, we hear about them because they are click bait for media coverage of course (very meta).

In general, becoming a software engineer through a boot camp would be a lot more reliable way to make $100-$200K than being an "influencer" -- you don't even need to be a very good coder to break $100K, which most influencers (let alone aspiring influencers) don't break.

https://www.theguardian.com/fashion/2022/feb/24/hustle-and-h...

https://nealschaffer.com/how-much-do-instagram-influencers-m...

[cercatrova]

The labor theory of value is not real, only the subjective theory of value is. People pay for what they like. Who are you to judge why people shouldn't value others testing lipstick over some engineers?

[TeMPOraL]

The labor theory of value is "not real" in the sense that it doesn't correctly describe how the market works at scale. At the same time, it is real in the sense that it's a close approximation of what we consider intrinsically fair.

Now, you can claim the judgement of the market should replace people's sense of fairness. In that case, there's no problem. Or, you can see the market being misaligned with our sense of fairness as a bug, and ask how it can be fixed.

[cercatrova]

Fair. However I like your closing sentence before you edited just now:

> Or, instead, you can ask how can the market be coerced to be more fair.

I explicitly don't see the market being misaligned with our sense of fairness as a bug, because I am not one to judge what people like, as I mentioned. For the one making lipstick videos, I will not tell them that their work is less valuable than engineers', because, as I mentioned, it is not for me to decide. If their viewers like it, then that's good for them.

[TeMPOraL]

> Fair. However I like your closing sentence before you edited just now:

>> Or, instead, you can ask how can the market be coerced to be more fair.

I edited it to make it closer to what I meant. "Coercing the market" feels too much like giving people green light to force their opinions on others, which is already a big problem in modern society, and I'm not advocating more of it.

What I'm after here is what I believe is a human universal, even if fuzzy in details: the hierarchy of value based on how much one's contributing to others' well-being. It's the one that would place farmers, doctors, garbage collectors and sanitation engineers near the top, and influencers near the bottom.

The way the market allocates rewards doesn't reflect the social or personal importance in any way - it reflects the ability of a person to capture rewards. Farmers, rescue workers, cleaners, etc. get little, because their work has been optimized to extreme degree. They are worse off because of scaling. Successful[0] entertainers and influencers get a lot, because they benefit from scaling - near-zero marginal cost of any additional member of the audience means that, even thought they provide small amount of value to each person and receive small reward, it adds up to a lot of money.

This mechanism, few people serving a tiny value multiplied by large audience, is just one of the "money printers". There are others, like controlling the way money flows (advertisers), or skimming off the high volume of money flow (finance), etc. Point being, all those mechanisms feel like they're exploiting the structure of the market, instead of being a useful service to others.

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[0] - Almost forgot about this, but it's probably the critical thing: these jobs are in a winner-takes-all market.

[CuriouslyC]

Influencers/marketers don't create anything. If they all got vaporized by aliens, people would just watch/play something else and buy slightly different products, and the world would go without much of a hitch.

If all the makers disappeared overnight, shit would get crazy in a hurry. Faster even for things like plumbers/electricians/etc, who get paid less than engineers ironically.

Tell me again about the value that influencers create.