Military? Are you kidding me?
And clergy contribute more than artists? What kind of results are these? I may agree with the rest, but not with the military and the clergy. To me, to be honest, they do little to improve society.
And what about the other professions? What about us psychologists? What about athletes? Cops? Salesmen? Architects? Truck drivers? Etc, etc, etc. None of those fall into any of the categories in that poll.
To deal with the last thing first, the categories shown are obviously chosen to provoke discussions like the one on this thread, not to give a comprehensive survey of all occupations. There's no effort to represent all professions on this particular chart, if indeed the people surveyed were even asked about other occupations.
For the military, doubtless what survey respondents had in mind was not the infamous but abstract "military-industrial complex" but ordinary soldiers and vets, whom people have much more concrete familiarity with. Those guys put their lives on the line for what they believe to be the security of their countrymen, for peanuts in terms of a paycheck.
Clergy vs. artists isn't hard to figure out at all. The bulk of people in the US are religious to some extent, and they have experienced the clergy being there for them to baptize their babies, to marry them, to visit them in the hospital, to bury their dead, and to counsel and pray for them through all the stress and troubles that accompany these life events. The average minister has about the same education as the average lawyer and gets paid a fraction of what the lawyer does. This day-to-day reality of people's interaction with the clergy, which is largely invisible in the media, struggles in public perception with headline scandals, which get SO much attention precisely because they DO violate so egregiously the actual norms of religious life.
Artists, meanwhile - are not there at people's sickbeds. Most of what one hears from society's "artists" are very self-absorbed egotists who have very little interest in how their art serves society at large, very little understanding or sympathy for ordinary folk, and a strong sense of entitlement that just making some BS and labeling it "art" entitles them to public support.
But that's the thing, society does quantify it with income. While some of these jobs may be further downstream of the monetary sewer system than others, I tend to believe that they're all interdependent on one another to exist. Like any other complex specialized system it requires function across the board to maintain stability.
But according to the poll the demand for business execs and lawyers is extremely low with the public, while demand for soldiers and teachers is high.
No, wrong -
society doesn't pay anybody
anything.
Employers do (or clients, for the more or less self-employed). An employer pays his employees (or clients pay professional service providers, like lawyers) whatever their work is worth to the employer. If that work stands to make (or save) the employer lots of money, the employer will pay more for it. But people like soldiers and teachers are paid by the state, and the state doesn't make any more or less of a profit if it pays its soldiers and teachers more or less.
Meanwhile, although they like to make a living, people like teachers and soldiers don't choose those professions for the sake of the money they will make. Also, they have much more limited options than business executives or lawyers to turn down one employer and go with another who will pay them more for the same work. So lawyers and businessmen make more, and teachers and soldiers less.
Meanwhile, remember that the chart is a survey result - it reflects public
perceptions, not realities (and perceptions only insofar as the methodology was sound, which I don't know).
