Social value of work: factors to consider

Your capacity to help people through your work depends heavily on the job that you take. Some professions help people a great deal, others help people to a slight degree, others don't help people at all on balance, and others harm people on balance. Some things to consider when thinking about how much social value you can contribute in a given job are:

• The effect of your product on customer's lives — How much does your product help the people who buy what you produce, relative to how much they pay for it? Does it dramatically improve their lives? Is it a convenience that they could do without? Does buying it make their lives worse?
• Positive externalities — Does your product indirectly benefit people other than those who buy it?
• Negative externalities — Does your product indirectly harm people other than those who buy it?
• Replaceability — Is your work something that nobody else would do as well as you can?

I've elaborated on these considerations below, and you can read about how they apply to various careers under [Case studies of social value of work]

The effect of your product on customer's lives

Some jobs benefit customers enormously. For example, doctors who screen patients for breast cancer can recognize breast cancer at an early stage when it's most treatable, saving patient's lives.

Some jobs benefit customers slightly. For example, a professional gardener might improve customer's lives by making their environment more pleasant, but not on the level of saving their lives.

Some jobs harm customers on balance. This is arguably true of casino workers, who enable compulsive gambling addiction, which can ruin people's lives.

Positive externalities

Some jobs benefit people other than the customers. For example, good educators can enable students to contribute more to society than they would otherwise be able to when they join the work force.

Negative externalities

Some jobs harm people other than customers. For example, lawyers who defend parties that are guilty in the context of lawsuits may harm the people who file legitimate lawsuits by reducing the chances that their lawsuits will succeed.

Replaceability

Just because a job contributes a lot of value doesn't mean that you can contribute the same amount of value by taking it. Food production is crucial for people's ability to live. But there's not a shortage of people who are available to produce food. So if you take a job in food production, you won't be crucial to people's ability to live — if you weren't doing it, somebody else would be.

In general, you can help people the most by taking a job that helps people and that other people wouldn't be doing (or wouldn't be doing as well as you) if you didn't take it.