this post was submitted on 23 May 2026
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So how does it work if I spend 10-20,000 hours in medical school and then spend three minutes setting your broken bone?
Healthcare’s goal should not be to be profitable. The government should subsidize both the education and pay of medical staff for the wellbeing of their people.
Ok, now do any other form of higher education.
Ok, now disconnect the ability to live comfortably from one's labor value.
Sure, but that doesn’t answer the question.
I think you can draw a line somewhere between “everyone’s skills are equally valuable” and “billionaires should exist.”
This metaphor doesn’t address the time required to develop skills.
The line I'm drawing is a wall between the value of your skills and the need to spend time using them just to afford to survive. Then if you choose to develop skills and use them for the benefit of others, it will be because you chose to and not because you felt you had no other choice. The time spent will be your own, for your own reasons and no one else's. Its value will be a value you hold, not relying on the value others perceive it to have.
That’s cool except what happens when there aren’t enough people who find 20,000 grueling hours in med school to be worth it when operating a water slide will give them the exact same lifestyle? How do we make more people want to be doctors? Or drive garbage trucks for that matter?
There are already people who spend years of effort getting less valuable positions. If it was purely about time/money spent, everyone would be competing for the most valuable jobs.
Yes, but how many people? How do you get more people to be janitors or roofers when you need more janitors or roofers?
Equally valuing a position also destigmatizes the role. There are countries with free post-secondary education that still have jobs at every position.
The same argument was made about the USSR, about a mechanic making as much as a doctor. They still had mechanics and doctors.
We could decrease the demand for doctors and garbage collectors any time we want, but capitalism says maximum growth, maximum consumption. Getting rid of that system will change the demand for those social roles as much as the supply.
By… getting less sick and having less garbage?
Well yeah. You think we get this sick and produce this much garbage naturally?
I don't know why you're getting downvoted when you're right. Whole lobby groups exist for the right to keep polluting, food deserts exist, anti-vax groups have taken over american healthcare so measles and smallpox are coming back, some people don't think poor kids deserve a school lunch and there are multiple ongoing water crises caused by irresponsible capitalism.
Capitalism creates more demand on resources across the board, including healthcare. It also increases waste since resources aren't used to their full potential when it's not profitable, so yes, there are ways to reduce garbage.
Why are you picking apart this simplification? OP is not suggesting we eliminate money, they are simply trying to showcase how fucked up billionaires are.
Are you here to defend billionaires?
Because it’s a dumb oversimplification that doesn’t really add anything to the discussion.
“Imagine you need to work to make money, but some people have more money than they could have ever made working” works just as well and doesn’t introduce a bunch of society-breaking plot holes.
Your training increases the value of your labor power (the cost of reproducing your labor and what the value of wages tend towards) making your hourly wage larger. The meme is good agitprop but it isn't real marxian analysis.
I've played around with this idea, and the best solution I came up with was amortizing hours spent in training over the course of a career. If you spend 20,000 hours in med school, and you have a projected career of (40 years × 2,000 hours per year) 80,000 hours, one hour of your labor would have a value of 1.25 "unskilled" hours.
Yeah but that doesn't really work because it still treats all the hours as fundamentally equal which just isn't true. It may take someone 20000 hours to become a doctor with a particular skillset, but that doesn't mean ANY person can do that. Person X may never, regardless of investment of time, be able to obtain a mastery of that skillset. Moreover, for things like surgery you're talking about the stacking of hours for regular education, med school, specialty, residency, and then surgery. Each of these is a threshold that increasingly fewer people can cross.
It seems that reasonably the best thing to do is to award additional value based on scarcity and necessity of profession, but you might just back yourself back into capitalism I guess? At the end of the day I can dig a ditch but you can't fix your grandfather's heart so that amortization is not a very satisfying split.
To be fair this isn't necessarily how socialism/communism works - it's just a good way to get people thinking about the insane disparity between the common person and the 1%.
Under socialism roles that are hard to fill either because they're hard/specialized or just undesirable can be certainly be compensated. It may not be directly monetarily, it could be earlier retirement, more time off, more desirable housing/location, etc.
And more realistically in a milder/earlier form of socialism different jobs could absolutely pay more. Maybe a doctor gets 5x what a grocery store stocker makes. (But housing/healthcare/etc is covered for both) That would still lead to a world exponentially more equitable than the one we live in.
I didn't say it was a particularly good solution. It's definitely more complicated than hour-for-hour.
It doesn't really matter for this point.
The point is that nobody earns ten million hours (1,140 constant years) of work ($1b @ $100/hr).
You can have a lot of leeway with ratios and that'll still never be true.
You also get paid while studying. What a concept :O
You did a whoopsy by picking health care as your example, but you’re spot-on. Our ability to develop new skills, learn from experience, and invent new ways of doing things is perhaps the distinguishing feature of human labor over mechanical processes.
This is a decent meme for the world of 15 years ago, but as algorithmic (and now AI) centric labor has taken over and turned us into “chickenized reverse centaurs” (as Cory Doctorow says), I think it accidentally makes the same case that the tech lords are making.
That is: output is output. Artists are valuable for the art they produce, not for being an embodied being in our shared space that specializes in looking at things from new angles. Coders are valuable for the finished software they produce, not for understanding the system in motion. Etc.
Edit: There’s a Marx quote I like…