Re: Does professional poker contribute to society?
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Police. Firemen. Doctors. Nurses. Teachers. Bankers. Soldiers. Electricity companies. Phone companies. Gas station attendants. Taxi drivers...etc...etc...
If you add up all those necessary services I bet you get pretty close to 90% of all jobs. I think you greatly overestimate the proportion of professions that are useless.
And even if your figure of 90% was right, it still doesn't make poker pros any less useless. We're back to the "Jobs X and Y are useless, so its OK for me to be useless too" argument again.
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In a perfectly competitive market for labour, social gains from working a job approach zero. And realistically, there are a whole lot of job markets that behave a lot like that.
Take a line worker in a factory. If they did not exist, there would be someone else in his or her place doing the exact same job for the same wage, offering the same marginal benefit to the company, who offers their product for the same price to consumers, who receive the same marginal utility from consuming that product.
The same is true for many wage based occupations.
It is not from the benevolence of the Lawyer, the Accountant, or the McWorker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest.
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