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.
A very rough indicator of how much you help your customers is how much they're willing to pay you. For example, Steve Jobs created products that many people were willing to pay a lot for, because they found them valuable, and as a result became a multi-billionaire.
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.
It's important to note that by taking a job that someone else could have done, you free that person up to contribute social value by taking a different job. So the value that you contribute isn't just the value that you contribute beyond the value that your hypothetical replacement would be contributing – it also includes the value that your hypothetical replacement contributes in his or her own job.
The point is that calculating the value that you contribute isn't as simple as the value that the job itself contributes: it's possible that you can contribute more by taking a job that contributes less to society than you could by taking a job that contributes more to society but that a lot of other people could do.
In general, you can help people the most through your work 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.
A final remark: the point about replaceability is also relevant to jobs that harm people on balance. If you take a job in an industry that harms people that lots of people are willing and able to do, you won't harm people very much. If you take a job in an industry that harms people that nobody's willing or able to do, you'll harm people a lot.