Social Impact of an Investment Banker?

Dude where is your nuance or critical thinking. Nobody even disagrees with your sentiment (e.g. 'administering band-aid' or that doctors by virtue have a halo of societal good to them), but you made a horrible job explaining your own points. Heart disease is the leading cause of death for 25-30% of Americans. Most problems are caused by obesity in outsized proportions, many medical solutions in this country are elective, and a vast majority are self-induced- the point here is that you're agnostic to the type of work being done and enabling people to live their lives in a capacity they want. Maybe you're helping someone who was in a gang who was running and tripped. See how individual situations are stupid to argue core points? Try to look at what the job really does. If you want to suck off a dying person to make their life better go ahead but you don't need to make it out like they are angels either (would you say prostitutes should be given this same reverence you are giving for doing such a service to society? If every school shooter had a prostitute would you think they'd go through with their plans?).

Using physicians to make your point is poor, because they are essentially facilitators and experienced webMD's themselves e.g. they give referrals and rarely actually do any care. They're not even the ones who administer shots to you. They look at what problems you have and suggest solutions, but are rarely administers of those solutions necessarily other than looking at care solutions (e.g. drugs). They don't do ACL work and again you're creating a strawman if you think anyone believes they don't add any real value to people's lives. Even so, the work of a brain surgeon, heart surgeon, regular surgeon, or physician, nurse, etc. are all so different. A better comparison would between someone in IB (proportionally to all people in Finance) is to someone in surgery or something in terms of magnitude of impact.

But let me expand on a point about facilitation. Those in the Finance field facilitate invention, improved products, a more robust system, increase of money to people who are good with it. Medically, you are improving people's capacity in their lives as a result of them being fucked up (e.g. repairing a leg) and rarely improving it outright (taking a normal out of shape unhealthy person and turning them into a God). Both jobs actually revolve around improving capacity of other people and amplifying it, but the medical profession (rightly or wrongly) has a halo around it because it is very simple to understand what is happening when you apply a band-aid on someone who is hurt. They get back closer to 'normal'. This is emotionally powerful, financially (costs so much), spiritually, etc. for someone to go through that and they are reverent in kind- just like if you give some starving kid in Africa $5, or even the monetary equivalent in what went into the surgery. These are different kinds of amplification and magnitude in the same comparison with a janitor or prostitute or plumber. But the reality is 95% of cases in Medicine are not these serious problems, they are writing a prescription for ear infection medication, or re-upping your cholesterol meds. You could even make a case that by having some of these solutions you are enabling poor decisions (if being obese meant you would die, would we be obese? obviously not advocating for a reduction in medical services but pointing out how easy it is to view things in different but valid ways). In the same way we don't put a halo around a bank teller for 'being a banker', regular nurses aren't brain surgeons who solve complicated problems. In general I see a halo around the medical profession but why really? Everyone helps other people in their jobs, that's why they exist. In terms of actual measurable impact it is complicated comparison so everyone (myself included) will always say the medical field is 'better for society'.

Not to mention many physicians can give bad advice which was my point about a job being what you make of it and how you perceive it, as well as existing for a reason because it provides value to society. In many cases the best help a physician could do is give sound exercise and nutritional advice, yet many are clueless when it comes to nutrition (limited to a few old courses in school). Being good in any job requires agency and motivation, and in a field where there are 1,000,000 physicians and many fewer high finance professionals the type of work will likely be much amplified by someone in Finance simply because of supply and the type of work being dealt with (e.g. facilitating the creation of a hospital, or even in PE where you better situate a company that makes masks or defibrillators, etc). The good physicians and Finance people of the world are doing amazing jobs alike, but they are simply vastly different types of work and deservedly someone in the care profession gets the 'halo' however it's a challenging conversation to compare with other fields.

The problem with your point of view is that it's overly virtuous and without any real critical thinking. No one even disagreed with you that the type of work you mentioned is more directly impactful. However, it is very difficult to compare apples and oranges between different types of work (few people frame finance v. medical field as amplifiers and simply as 'good doctor' vs 'evil finance guy') which is why people can justifiably chase the biggest paycheck (e.g. the market defining what value they bring which is not the best but a very simple way of doing things). Anyway, curious what you think about my prostitute example. But again, no one is disagreeing with you and any one of us who might agree with even my most 'rude' points are agreeing with you in base sentiment. It seems like you don't even understand what arguments were being made, or what you're arguing against... Again, you can't compare apples to oranges easily and my point is that being a doctor is virtuous (like the sentiment you have which we all have to a large degree) because we can 'see' the direct impact they make. But they are simply more magnified versions of your plumber, janitors, prostitutes, etc. and make a more 'dignified' life (justifiably, but identifying those reasons is intelligible and important). You can't make the comparison to Finance people well and it's hard. Finance people can facilitate and make decisions with much more magnitude generally, but everyone is a 'cog in the system' for the most part. You're not inventing anything as a surgeon unless you're already intelligent enough to be an inventor, and you're not changing the principals of investing by funding an invention by said genius. Everyone has value add in this world and in generalizing, the medical and high finance fields are characteristically different. A brain surgeon is WAY different than a heart surgeon as to a regular surgeon to a physician. They are all different and important, but so are Finance people in a more abstract way. Thoughts?