It's most certainly better for your soul, but get ready to take a pay cut. After a short career in game development and a much longer career in museum/library/archives, my take is that our societies values are out of whack: the more your job benefits your community and the planet the less you will get paid, and vice versa. It's even worse for social services.
You'll also take a hit in your reputation among other developers, most of whom seem to have gone into it for money and don't seem to care whether or not their labor is doing anything to benefit society.
Good work is still worth doing of course. You just have to count the work itself as one of the benefits.
"Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation."
when I left Google to work in clean energy, I took a 50% pay cut. But, that's still more than enough money to live very happily on. IMO it's true what they say about there being no marginal improvement to happiness after ~80k.
Glad you're happy, I also want to get out of my current industry eventually. How much was 50% actually? For all I know, you could have went from 400k -> 200k. Do you live in a HCOL area?
> You'll also take a hit in your reputation among other developers, most of whom seem to have gone into it for money
Exactly the environment and people I would like to get away from. I care little for what they think, but yes, I understand how some could see this as "career suicide".
> my take is that our societies values are out of whack: the more your job benefits your community and the planet the less you will get paid, and vice versa. It's even worse for social services.
There is no "what society values" at work here, only supply and demand. What you witness is the fact that jobs that have intrinsic meaning and are more fulfilling are paid less well, because employees are willing to make that compromise. You could say the increase in happiness is priced in. Same reason game devs have bad working conditions, people still wait in line to work on them.
> There is no "what society values" at work here, only supply and demand
That sounds as if supply and demand were laws of nature like gravity or speed of light. They are nothing but forces we create (i.e. purely anthropogenic), and appear god-like only because what society solely values right now is the normativity of the market (as opposed to historical normativities such as the state power, religion, morality and so on).
> You could say the increase in happiness is priced in
That sounds further like market essentialism. "If market is paying you less it means you must be compensated in externalities". If only markets were that good at pricing in externalities, we wouldn't have climate change problems for example.
Markets are great tools for deciding the prices under specific conditions, but it is a grave misapplication to try and orient the entirety of human potential around them.
> They are nothing but forces we create (i.e. purely anthropogenic), and appear god-like only because what society solely values right now is the normativity of the market (as opposed to historical normativities such as the state power, religion, morality and so on).
What happens when you start to distort markets with top-down intervention is, in sum, decreased prosperity for all. Communism is just the most extreme example of this.
The market has failure modes that need to be actively corrected, like pricing in externalities or preventing monopoly abuse. But governments usually err on the over-interventionist side. When you look at the world you can’t help but notice this pattern, it is really that obvious.
> But governments usually err on the over-interventionist side. When you look at the world you can’t help but notice this pattern, it is really that obvious.
There can be 3 classes of errors with interventions; 1) intervening when it is not warranted (over-intervention), 2) not-intervening when required (under-intervening) and 3) intervening in a way that ends up not working out (intervention-outcome mismatch).
I think most of the errors are type 3, which are most liable to mis-identified as "over-intervention", but they are not. Mismatched interventions do not prove that there is a magical essence to real-world markets that render them infallible, dynamical, adaptive, self-correcting systems.
A simpler explanation to all this is that it is really hard to come up with the right interventions for the market, but also markets really need interventions when they need it.
> I think most of the errors are type 3, which are most liable to mis-identified as "over-intervention", but they are not.
The thing is, there is no reliable way to prevent these errors, which means in general it is better to not interfere. If we had a way to ensure good decisions, we wouldn’t need some of the institutions that we have in our modern states.
One especially egregious example: California Assembly Bill 5. You could argue that this wasn’t just incompetence, but union corruption, costing many freelancers their livelihood. Another one was SF mayor London Breed‘s misguided attempt to regulate food delivery during the pandemic, which had the predictable result of cutting off regulated areas from service altogether.
You cannot let people decide these things that have no personal accountability and suffer no downside from this madness. It sure would be nice if it worked, but it doesn’t.
> The thing is, there is no reliable way to prevent these errors, which means in general it is better to not interfere.
That is not a forgone conclusion. It is only better not to intervene if the expected cost of intervention is higher than the expected cost of not intervening.
> One especially egregious example...
These are relatively minor regulations that you argue gone bad. What do you think would be the realized costs of these misapplications? Would they be in the same order of magnitude with for example the costs of not breaking up monopolies? I highly doubt it.
I get it, in countries like the US the government apparatus has a difficulty representing the welfare of the entirety of the nation, which tends to affect the interventions negatively, but that is not an argument against government intervention but an argument against the government itself, which is culpable of under-regulation just as much as over-regulation. (90's deregulatory Clinton laws on banks and telecommunications come to mind, which led to huge market consolidations and therefore market inefficiencies which we still suffer from.)
As we agree, markets sometimes need serious babysitting, so we ought to pick better babysitters.
I think you are right about the market effects, but wrong about the causes. The way I see it, it's not that the employees are willing to make the sacrifice per se, it's that there are just more job applicants total. If the supply is increased, the price will drop. It's not that people want to work for a lower wage and then make up for it in the quality of the work, it's that since the population is broader, you find more people willing to work for a lower wage. You get the less frequent edges of the Gaussian curves because you have more people. You see this in zoos, hospitals, elder care, etc.
It's not a question of society being backwards, it's just a function of market based jobs. The cause is amoral and independent of the wishes of the people in the system, though the effects very much have moral relevance.
A friend who has always worked in NGOs/charitable trusts shared an interesting observation about all this.
She said that people in the top at these NGOs and trusts are usually get paid filthy rich like a CEO/Director would get paid but it pretty much ends there. Everybody else down the line are expected to expect and accept pittance. She said a salary negotiation among rank and file is frowned upon, especially by the people who are high up on the ladder and they are the same people who crib about not attracting top talent.
Wish passion alone could fill the belly and pay medical bills.
This isn't my experience. There's a difference between signalling admiration and actual respect.
Of course there are plenty of good people out there, but in my experience the plurality, and probably the majority of FAANG peeps will be made uncomfortable by the implicit challenge to the morality of their choices. Even though they might signal support for your actions; privately dealing with the cognitive dissonance does often result in eroded respect. A common defense mechanism is to see themselves as better than you because you just couldn't take the pressure to work at a "world leader" company, after all if they aren't the best people making the best choices, why would they be paid so much? You just burned out because you couldn't make Level 5.
> the more your job benefits your community and the planet the less you will get paid, and vice versa. It's even worse for social services.
In a free market economy, this is an entirely false statement. People pay for the things they value. They more they value it, the more they pay.
Compare the amount of hours spent playing video games to the amount of hours spent touring museums. It's not close. People value video games much more greatly than museums.
Just because you value certain things more than others doesn't give them any intrinsic value.
Simple, black and white mental models of the world may lead a person to draw shockingly wrong conclusions about the world. The pay in non-profit absolutely sucks. It sucks for a number of reasons, not some simple econ 101 reason. It sucks because there just isn't much revenue in asking people for donations. It sucks because all the leaders making pay decision are making sacrifices and feel like everyone else should be as well. It sucks because there are always more young, idealistic people to replace the burned out, cynical ones. It sucks because most of the work is low skilled. It sucks because non-profits are somewhat divorced from competitive pressures and are not forced to pay for absolutely the most talented people. It sucks because the kind of people who take these jobs are happy to take pay cuts.
> In a free market economy, this is an entirely false statement. People pay for the things they value. They more they value it, the more they pay.
Except this is an entirely false statement. In free market economy, there is no easy way for people to pay for many things they value, and know that they will receive the goods in return.
I may value a stable climate, clean air, a stable ecosystem, but the free market alone doesn't provide a way for me to pay what would be required and know that I will get a return, because unfortunately, such things require collective action.
well, if museums would drive the same marketing campaigns (read propaganda or simply media based manipulation), this might easily change... Also generally the amount of time you can spend in museums is somehow limited, as most don't allow you to be active (like videogames do in a sort of lobotomied way).
As for your example: if you compare the amount of time people play in bands/sing in choirs (often without any direct money involved, e.g. around church or school) you've got an obvious example that people don't naturally "pay more for the things they value" (or see the need to pay or get payed at all). I value this very much and if someone was coming up and saying: pay up, I'd say - come on guys, let's do this on our own.
This is a perfectly testable hypothesis in the free market. You can start a museum and market it, and see if you generate a profit. If you don't, then you have to fund it yourself (pay) or hope a handful of others value it and pay.
> often without any direct money involved, e.g. around church or school
There's much money involved in organizing people and having venues for whatever it is they do inside those venues. In these cases, the people paying for these organized singing events are what you would consider a patron. Churches and schools aren't free.
Modern instruments cost a lot of money, lots of labor to produce.
As far as just some friends getting together and signing because they enjoy it, that's obviously free. But it's not a service that someone else is providing to you, that's just something you're doing because you feel is has value. What would be more analogous would be having a civic center where people perform and.... people pay money to enter the venue and be entertained.
Some people greatly value libraries and museums. I don't. Those people should pay for them. If from time to time, I might want to use their services, I would gladly pay. If there was a membership required, perhaps I would enroll if I felt the cost was worth the benefit. This happens every day for many other industries.
Anyway, the root of the point was that people don't value librarians so they don't get paid as well as programmers. This is true. If it wasn't true, they would be paid more. I know this really hurts the socialist sensibilities of people on this site, but it's the cold hard truth.
> Modern instruments cost a lot of money, lots of labor to produce.
well, I'm not sure, how the trumpet from 1970 differs from a modern instrument (and yeah, people are still using these, where I play), but yeah, "lot of money, lots of labor" ><((((*>
And btw., one of the bands I'm in plays sometimes for money, but incurs no cost for membership or anything. It's just there.
> well, I'm not sure, how the trumpet from 1970 differs from a modern instrument
I consider a trumpet a modern instrument. How did you procure said trumpet? Did you pick it from the wild trumpet tree? No, of course not.
Someone mined the copper and zinc, refined them, someone combined them into the alloy brass, someone formed that brass into a trumpet. Of course, the trumpet wasn't conceived magically, it was something that went through countless iterations and revisions as instrument building matured. Then someone had to sell the trumpet to you. Unless you were at the factor-direct trumpet store, it was shipped to a retail location or warehouse where you then purchased it. Money and labor was invested just so you can obtain the trumpet.
How much labor goes into making a trumpet? Lots. Someone realized there was a market for trumpets and invested a good bit of capital to produce them. Improvements in manufacturing (aka, market efficiency) has resulted in high quality trumpets being produced cheaply, same as anything else. I'd say, the entire price structure of the trumpet (or much of anything, really) is entirely labor based. The metals exist in the ground. Digging them up is free (purchasing mineral rights notwithstanding) in terms of needed to pay the earth for them.
Much like libraries, there are places you can rent musical instruments like trumpets. These are often 'required' for education purposes, so why doesn't the government just have a trumpet library same as the book library? Don't you enjoy music? Why don't you demand taxes pay for instruments for the homeless that can't afford their own instruments? They're so enriching and such.
All those things exist because people voted with their money to make sure they exist. It's not because some greater good commanded their existence.
Easy solution: Put everyone under highly-addictive drugs. The addiction will ensure that people value getting more of the drug far more than anything else, so we can consolidate the complete economy into producing drugs and nothing else. It's alright, cause we're producing what people value, right?
The video games vs museums comparison is kinda terrible though, don't you think? I physically _can't_ just go to a museum after work like I can play a video game or watch a documentary. There's a huge number of literally free museums in my city, but I still have to cook for my family.
I don't mean to pick on video games just for being video games. The place I worked at was actually pretty great when I started: we made these great educational games but then got bought out by another business that changed our focus in a negative way.
Like literature and other media, games can absolutely be a tool for good, for exploring all kinds of history and issues and raising awareness. They're also great for maintaining sanity in difficult times.
You're making a very broad statement here. A more specific one would demonstrate the underlying problem. Our society relies on the free market to assign value to work, and the free market values video games higher than education or improving the environment that supports us. Capitalism doesn't really support the values people would at least claim to believe in.
In my statement I wasn't trying to center museums particularly. The OP was asking about nature conservation and museums/libraries are the aspect of preservation of the natural world or care of people and communities that I'm most familiar with. Our capitalist society doesn't place much value on these. [Update: wording]
Sustainable tourism is a good example that is helping add value to the natural world within the constraints of our capitalist society. When an animal is worth more alive than dead then local people are more likely to protect it. Gorilla Trekking in Rwanada and Uganda are examples where the tourism dollars had greatly reduced poaching in the parks. Sadly things are unravelling without tourism money coming into the country and poaching is on the rise.
Unfortunately there aren't going to be many jobs in this sector currently until COVID-19 is brought more under control.
You'll also take a hit in your reputation among other developers, most of whom seem to have gone into it for money and don't seem to care whether or not their labor is doing anything to benefit society.
Good work is still worth doing of course. You just have to count the work itself as one of the benefits.
"Work as if you live in the early days of a better nation."