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Lumifer comments on How valuable is volunteering? - Less Wrong Discussion
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I think there is some confusion here between opportunity cost of time and costs of producing value. They are not the same thing.
Consider someone whose skills are in demand, for example a statistician with skills and experience to deal with the Big Data. He can pick from a number of jobs and the top tier of jobs available to him all pay around $200K/year. He selects one of these jobs and is paid $200K/year.
What's his opportunity cost of time? $200K/year. What's his wage? $200K/year. You are saying that he does not get any economic surplus and this does not seem to be true at all.
While I am sympathetic to this view, it strikes me that it is not very compatible with supporting charities (including EA) or, say, government social safety net programs.
I deliberately chose a simple example to keep it simple. The full macroeconomic analysis is trickier. I can write a more detailed explanation that does an analysis with more people (each replacing another). I'll do so later when I have the time.