[icandoitbetter]

Well written, but I completely disagree. Behind your reasoning lies the classic libertarian argument about epistemological complexity (not saying you are a libertarian, just that you are using Austrian school reasoning): because we can't know what can potentially save lives, we should just let people do their thing without making any judgments on what should be our collective priorities. I, for one, have no doubt that a doctor saves more lives than a car mechanic. There are a lot of outcomes we can know, be certain about, do something about. If we concentrated as a society on defeating aging, for example, we would perhaps get rid of jobs that could very indirectly help in increasing our longevity, but we would replace them with jobs that do so much more directly and effectively.

You also completely misinterpret Maslow's hierarchy. It's not a prescriptive, but a descriptive one. An individual who has to struggle daily to survive usually does not have time for poetry.