[oxmane]

I believe this is incorrect even from the simple economic perspective.

Many companies (BigTech for example) are extremely net-positive financially. This means that the value they gain per employee is much higher than what they pay them.

Taking this further - the customers in many cases (and certainly in ideal cases) are getting more value than the price they are paying (hence they agree to pay), so in a sense you could argue that the value is actually even larger. This of course scales several times when working on some infrastructure (though the effect is very not obvious).

[aaron695]

If you are sitting in a cafe in Holland with a lot of people and someone runs over and says I'll pay you $10,000 to come and stick your finger in a dyke.

And you do.

Did you just save the city and the billions? Is that more meaningful and contributes more economically than someone who uses their rescue skills and saves a drowning stoned university student while walking home alone.