[AppleBananaPie]

Thanks for sharing :)

I have very little context but it's interesting that, presumably, the lower profit industry was replaced with the higher profit one.

And on top of that the higher profit one is probably of less value to society.

[dijit]

The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food.

The second highest value thing you can do is produce machines that help produce food (or other raw materials).

The least value thing you can do is the services that are needed to support the production of machines that produce food.

This is an uncomfortable thing to read for someone (such as myself) working in tech, in fact that's where the "sectors" comes from.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economic_sector

The goal of each sector is to make the previous sectors more productive, and so they're squeezed to become commodity.

We therefore intentionally incentivise de-valuing the things that bring us value as a civilisation, and over-valuing the things that don't.

[pjc50]

That rather implies a society of subsistence farmers is the "most valuable", which is the one thing everyone in every society runs away from as fast as possible when technology prevents economic alternatives.

[theptip]

Seems like you’ve smuggled in your conclusion with your definition of “highest value”?

Using the normal definition (how many dollars we will pay for it) the statement is of course objectively false.

Agriculture is certainly necessary, but to take a more extreme example, is air valuable?

[showerst]

Do we need more farmers, or for food to be more 'valued' in a monetary sense? The developed world is awash in affordable food. Even machine tools are incredibly cheap and accessible, the issues around those are related to where they're built and creating skilled labor to run them.

I work laughably far from anything that provides basic needs to anybody, but that's not because I don't value food, it's because our system is _incredibly_ successful at creating it so I can go do other stuff.

I do agree we have some huge policy issues to deal with around food affordability and skilled labor and supply chains, but I don't think it's because we've de-valued food production.

[nine_k]

> The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food.

This highly depends on the actual productivity. Producing food by subsistence farming barely feeds you and your children. Making something that improves food production, from ploughs to better seeds to fertilizers, has a significantly larger impact, even if you're not directly producing something edible.

[pas]

People change their diets to live longer, and in general medicine seems more valuable. People happily pay a lot for more QALYs.

Having food security is important, just as having warm clothes and shelter too, right?

Providing what people need is value, just providing "food" can lead to a lot of negative value (see the obesity epidemic).

[DonHopkins]

What is the lowest value thing you can do with your life? Props comedian who destroys good food with a sledge hammer?

Bill Hicks on Gallagher and Carrot top

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJjgFcJ0DoQ

[dylan604]

> The highest value thing you can do in this life is produce food.

Talk to a non-corporate farmer today, and ask them how valued their production of food is. Society, however, does not agree with your sentiment. Obviously I'm nitpicking, but if society agreed with your proposed value, the billionaires of the world would be farmers and not tech people. That's how weird and out of balance we seem to be today.