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Comment by dstein | Hacker News Reader

If you happen to take a wider view, almost our entire society is frivolous. Banks, politicians, salesmen, lawyers... very few people actually do anything that improves peoples lives in meaningful ways. Farmers, scientists, teachers, and construction workers are maybe the exception.

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Many farmers, scientists, teachers, and construction workers lead meaningful careers.

But think about McDonalds. The food is grown by "farmers", the buildings were built by construction workers, the people who work there were taught by teachers, and the food was created by scientists.

Some, but not all, of those people are doing meaningful work.

Now consider the banker that renegotiates mortgages with long time customers to help them stay solvent, the politicians who stand up for constituents, the salespeople who help people find a car that will really serve them well, the lawyer that takes a pay cut to defend the accused...

Meaning is not found in what you do, but how you do it.

You've misconstrued "improving someone's life" to being "meaningful work". Maybe a banker thinks his career is meaningful, but bankers do not improve people's lives. The people who built the house you're buying are the ones who improve your life. The banker is an unnecessary middleman. Middlemen in almost every scenario are redundant and merely add drag to our society. If we could eliminate the bankers job, automate it somehow, maybe we can get them to pick cherries or something useful.

What rot. The banker is a middleman, it's true, but a very necessary one. The bank connects people who have money (old people) to people who want to borrow money (young people), allowing house-sized quantities of money to be borrowed and paid back over a period of decades in a way that lowers risk and maximises accessibility for the depositors. If it weren't for banks, then most young people would be (essentially) unable to afford to buy houses.

Heck, if it weren't for banks we'd probably live in some kind of Jane Austen world where the vast majority of the land is owned by a few super-rich families and the folks who don't inherit money have no way of getting ahead.

You do realize that half of all wealth in the US is in the hands of 400 super-rich families, and that this concentration is increasing, not decreasing?

Maybe you were being ironic and I just took you too literally!

Likewise there's a big difference between forcefully inserting yourself as a necessary catalyst (aka, a middleman), and meaningfully improving someone's life.

It's the difference between someone who INVENTS a medication, and someone who collects 5% fee any time you PURCHASE the medicine. Sure, the pharmacists might go on and on about how they are helping people, but really it's the chemists that are doing the hard work that ultimately are the ones improving your life.

While the dude who invents the drug that saves my life is doing far greater work than the dude who makes it possible for me to buy that drug at the pharmacy two blocks away, they're both doing good work, and both a net gain to the world. Why disrespect either?

There are genuinely useless, parasitic, and net-negative people out there, but none of the proposed examples (bankers, pharmacists, Google) falls into this category.

No it isn't, both are equally necessary for your life to be improved. You may consider inventing more prestigious and you could argue that it improves more peoples lives but some hypothetical scientist who simply invented a bunch of stuff in his basement that was never distributed would have as little impact on the world as anyone.

Well, a lot of early banking was developed for and by farmers who wanted to lock in a fixed price for their crops before the harvest.

And science and teaching are only possible because of the economic surpluses generated by trade, which is again, facilitated by banking. Teachers don't work for free! If anyone threatens their final salary pensions they go on strike!

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