Asymmetrical Information

Easy -- the President of the U.S. (whomever that is). This job impacts almost every person on the planet:
- Sets policy for the largest economy.
- Sets foreign trade policy
- Largest military with greatest ability to react quickly to changing needs; e.g., tsunami relief, war on terror.

Name another single job that can affect more people directly for better or worse.

Omphalos, the Center of the Universe. Each of us have the most important job in the world—to ourselves.

The answer depends on who you ask the question. Ask a sick person, he'll answer the MD or Pharma Co thats made him feel better. Ask a farmer, and he'll tell you the Agricultural scientist that engineered his improved crops. Ask someone on the better end of a divorce, he'll answer his attorney. Ask a junkie, and he'll say his dealer. Ask a teacher, and he'll tell you another teacher. Ofcourse this is a rather broad generalization, but these are the answers you would recieve most of the time, from these sort of common people.

Imo its the defense contractors that have made us the worlds only superpower. Because the fear other nations have of the US is what makes our lives easy and our purchases cheap. A close second would be the people in our entertainment industry, who ended the cold war and made us the envy of every nation. They convinced the whole world that life in the US is accurately reflected by programming such as Baywatch and Friends, or their late 80's early 90's equivalents.

Journalist? Youve got to be kidding.

Heres my candidate. Spielberg made movie about a man who saved a thousand people, but nary a peep has been said for a man who literally saved millions of people.

http://www.highyieldconservation.org/articles/forgotten_benefactor.html

The lesson to journalists should be that far too often rather than bringing honor to the story, they become the story itself, and as a result they betray their very own purpose.

Being rather impressed by modern society's achievements, I'd have to say the division of labor and specialization it creates make it difficult to select one profession as being the most important. Perhaps when things were much simpler long ago one might have been able to single out a certain role as contributing the most, but these days everything we do depends so much on what others do that really, we're all just doing our part. Serial criminals and others who only make negative contributions would be exceptions.

That being said, I agree Norman Borlaug's role as father of the Green Revolution sure makes him a good candidate (the link in comment above isn't working right now, it was his 91st birthday yesterday and he's been getting a lot of attention).

Reminds me of a scene in C S Forrester's novel "The Ship," which profiled the crew of a (fictional) light cruiser during WWII. One of the characters was the ship's electrician, who was on the edge of insanity...he had convinced himself that, since just about everything on the ship used electricity in one way or the other, electricity was a force of sacred significance and *he* was the most important person on the ship. Of course, it was lost on him that those who fired the weapons, navigated the ship, stoked the boilers, etc all could have made similar claims...

I think this is sort of like asking the question "What is the most important tool for building a house". The fact that the question is being asked shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue.

-lr

How about proofreader? You know, the kind of guy who points out that the "medecins" are "sans frontieres" and that children are born not borned.

First of all, I'd like to rule out "mother" as a job, and just stick with occupations that involve providing some sort of good or service to others in exchange for cash. Oh, don't get me wrong, I love my mother, and I realize that without mothers none of us would be here. But none of us would be here without oxygen either, and if we start allowing roles like "mother" into the competition we might as well allow "friend" as well, since without any friends very few of us would find life worth living.

My first impulse is to say that "police officer" is the most important job, because enforcement of the law - especially as it pertains to violence and theft - is the sine qua non of civilization. If all of the cops in the US instantaneously disappeared, along with anyone reasonably prepared to step in and replace them (e.g. the National Guard is vaporized as well), what would happen? Best case scenario is that some semblance of order would arise through vigilantism and "frontier justice"; worst-case scenario is that we'd look like the Democratic Republic of Congo for a few decades, until the most powerful thug was able to consolidate his rule. I can't imagine much life-saving medical research being able to continue in either of these transitory environments, so the Jonas Salk types who usually get mentioned in these discussions definitely take a back-seat to Chief Wiggum (sorry, must stop with the Simpsons references) as far as I'm concerned.

Another candidates is "farmer"; hunter/gatherers don't develop polio vaccines any more than the armed thugs in the Congo do.

Finally, "dude at the power company who knows how to keep my lights on" deserves a special mention as well. He rocks.

Of course, cops, farmers, teachers, doctors, et. al., are all vitally important when considered in toto, but most individuals within each group have a relatively low marginal utility to society, which explains why the free market (which is always fair) rewards Bill Gates better than it does your high-school math teacher. So in this respect, Jonas Salk does wind up winning the competition over Chief Wiggum after all: the elimination of a single world-class medical researcher is a much greater impoverishment to society as a whole than the elimination of a single police officer is.

Sewage and waste treatment engineer

A close second would be the people in our entertainment industry, who ended the cold war and made us the envy of every nation. They convinced the whole world that life in the US is accurately reflected by programming such as Baywatch and Friends, or their late 80's early 90's equivalents.

Funny, I didn't think many American movies and shows were shown in the Warsaw pact nations. However, there is that story of some documentary that was supposed to make the US look bad that the Soviet government decided to show the Russian people but inadvertantly ended up showing some well stocked supermarkets that made the Russians just feel sorry about their pitiful state.

Video game designers.

Hydrological and Hydrodynamical Engineer.

1. Potable water is much more important from a survival standpoint than food.

2. Effective management of water supplies is vital for highly productive farming.

3. Every method for large-scale electric power generation involves liquid water or steam (and IIRC, electric power is pretty reliably the largest industry in modern economies).

Unfortunately, no civilization in the history of the world...

The guy who invented aspirin - Heinrich Dreser -also invented heroin.

I'm inclined to agree with the water comments, but I'm a bit biased - my father designs water treatment facilities. I knew he was important! This makes up for my disappointment at five, when I found out that 'engineer' didn't mean 'train driver'.

One might (MIGHT) say that the most important job is the one where there's a problem if they don't show up. And I don't mean all of them (for instance, police), but an individual.
I've had bosses whose absence would have made it far easier for everyone else to get their job done, if you understand what I'm talking about.
President? Very, very replacable. Most CEO's are very replacable. Hmm...
My vote would be for two:
- Senior secretaries. I can't remember how many organizations I've dealt with where the senior secretaries ran the place. If the boss didn't show up, nobody noticed. But if the secretary didn't show up, everything ground to a halt.
- Moms. Irreplacable. If a mom disappears, there's a big hole.

Hmm. Interesting question.

ATM, I read an article a few months back that claimed western culture was the main factor in the collapse of the USSR. It was pirated western TV that created the USSR black market for things like Jordache jeans, Nintendo, designer sunglasses, etc. The Soviets were watching Cheers and MTV. The article also stated the Monsters of Rock show that pulled 2 million people to Red Square in 1988 was the point that much of the Soviet leadership realized they were in trouble. Then a couple weeks ago on the Fox weekend morning bizness shows the old guy with the bow tie and southern drawl made the same argument and he won his point imo.

The older I get, the more I realize the power of television. It's not that I watch much TV myself, its that the amount of conversation and imitation inspired by TV sometimes makes me consider watching the OC or one of the million CSI's.

Dear Doc,

I know that what I'm about to write is ridiculously geeky, but, as a former chemist, I have to stand up for Felix Hoffman as the true popularizer of Aspirin and the popularizer of Heroin. Hoffman was the chemist who acetylated salicylic acid to form Aspirin for Bayer and who acetylated morphine to form Heroin for Bayer. Dreser was the business guy (although trained in pharmacology) who made Hoffman's work into products.

Even more geeky: it turns out that both Aspirin and Heroin had already been synthesized in non-commercial quantities decades before Hoffman came up with a commercial way to make them.

OK, back to Megan's original question. I think that one of the most important but underrated jobs for the last fifty years or so is science fiction writer (hey, I said in the first sentence that this was going to be geeky). Physics and engineering is so obviously important to everything that makes civilization worth having that I don’t think it’s worth explaining why that’s so. But what makes young people study physics and engineering? More importantly, what makes young people study physics and engineering with the goal of creating radically new products and developing new understanding? I think that a large part of what has attracted creative people into physics and engineering in the last 50 years has been science fiction writers. I’ve met a few people from JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratories), and, whenever the subject came up, they’ve all mentioned SciFi (often Robert A. Heinlein ) as a reason they decided to go into aerospace engineering. Jules Verne is thought to have at least partially inspired a number of physicists; for example, Freeman Dyson is thought to have been at least partially inspired by “From Earth to the Moon” in his early interests in physics. There are other examples, but I think I’ve made the point I wished to.

What you say about aspirin and heroin is true - at least according to internet resources. I checked it out more fully after commenting.

Unless it's overly broad, I'd say the Sons of Martha get the nod. Engineers.

The Generalist - the person who can talk to the engineers, and to the people who actually have to make the things, and to the visionaries or marketroids who decide what gets made, and to the money people who make it all happen.

Probably because I've worked in three of those four categories.

Somewhere in the former Soviet Union where their troops haven’t been paid for weeks or even months, there’s a soldier who still remains at his post, guarding nuclear materials that he could probably otherwise steal and sell for millions on the black market.

That guy’s got my vote.

Farmers. Every civilization rests on farmers producing more food than they eat themselves. None of the other groups, however meritorious, could exist without that surplus. The bigger the surplus, the fancier the civilization can be.

(And to a much smaller extent, fishermen.)

Network engineers. Without us, we wouldn't even be having this conversation.

Thorley...this guy isn't in his job anymore:
http://www.mosnews.com/feature/2004/05/21/petrov.shtml
..but for a few minutes, it was clearly the most important job in the world.

can you ask "what is the most important organ in my body?" ...the appendix is a tiny, useless thing, but if it wants to, it can take the whole system offline permanently.

it's harmony in the way the parts work together that is the most important to the success of the organism, every cell in the body fulfilling its own duties...break that and the system collapses; keep that and the system functions...

I'd go for either police man or civil servant:- neither is important in themselves but countries with ineffective police and corrput civil services inevitably seem to be poor and violent.

But once you get order in place - all the rest - doctors teachers busineesmen - seem to bloom naturally.

It was pirated western TV that created the USSR black market for things like Jordache jeans, Nintendo, designer sunglasses, etc.

Then obviously the important people were the pirates. Aaarrgh!

I once heard Warren Buffet speak, and he said that his job (allocating money) wasn't nearly as important as, say, that of a doctor that treats patients. But each doctor can only treat so many patients over time. By improving how money is allocated, fund managers can do far more good (or harm) to the general economy. They can help to guarantee that there are funds for medical research, and that the funds aren't wasted, and that there are funds for water treatment, etc.

I'm not trying to suggest a 'most important job', just echoing the original point that there are questions of scale involved. Helping to allocate billions of dollars of funds more efficiently can have a far bigger effect than treating one person at a time, while allocating funds poorly can destroy massive amounts of wealth, as communist countries have shown repeatedly.

Elementary School Teachers. They lay the foundation for everything else, and the profession doesn't depend on technology.

> But once you get order in place - all the rest - doctors teachers busineesmen - seem to bloom naturally.

There's an assumption in there that "order in place" requires police and civil servants. Since there are counter-examples (order without police or civil servants), that assumption seems unnecessary, even if corrupt police and civil servants do seem to make "order in place" impossible.

TEACHERS!

Being Hitler is the most important job. After launching a world war and authoring genocide, he's spent the next 60 years being the guy whom every politician in the USA gets compared to. If Hitler didn't keep doing his job, then how could we be morally outraged over every single political disagreement we face? Our republic would be unrecognizable.

Bollinger's bizarre statement is derivative of his own scholarship. Twenty years ago, when he was merely the professor that the chicks dug at Michigan Law School, he taught a course called "Mass Media." Since lawyers have far too little self-respect to claim that their own profession is the world's most important, it isn't surprising that Bollnger picked the profession that is the subject of his academic work.

The most important profession to the "modern world"? If "important" means "consequential," then the most important profession is, as always, soldiering.

garbage collector

Pastor. What can be more important than one's eternal salvation!

Actually, I feel inclined to agree that journalism is the most important profession out there, at least where democratic countries are concerned. While governments are the ones doing the actual decisionmaking, the system of choosing governments in a democracy depends on a large number of individuals making decisions on who to elect. However, these millions of voters depend on journalism to make informed decisions, and therefore, journalists contribute an important part, especially the mass media.

In a hypothetical setting where the entire population of a democratic body (be it a village or a nation) depends on one journalistic source for their information, it becomes quite obvious that this one source would be the key in determining the government and thus the policy of said democratic body. Of course, the real world is more complex than this simple example, and there are channels of information that bypass the journalistic channels. Still, Orwell correctly pointed out that "he who controls the present controls the past", but IMHO he fell short there - he, who controls the perception of the present controls the present. When all you know is that there are bombs falling, and the press tells you it is Eurasia bombing you, in the absence of other sources this becomes the truth.

Now, the really interesting question would be "are journalists acting responsibly with this amount of power, and what control mechanisms exist to make sure that voters are informed on the basis of facts" - a question I think journalism never has asked itself.

apex

Lets put the question differently: where (to which professions) do the smartest people go ?
To science, of course. To bussines. Some go to politics.

Journalism ? No way. (Except Jane). Journalists are definitely not the brightest bulbs.

Okay Apex, I like your points; though I don't put journalism that high.

I keep waiting for the "fake but accurate" line to come in. That just has me put journalists into the old lawyer joke, "What's better than one lawyer chained to the bottom of the ocean...a thousand lawyers chained to the bottom of the ocean!"

Reminds me to go check the Harris poll to see where press comes in the ranking for American public trust.

At least I would say the bloggers are pretty aggressive in correcting their own when they are wrong. MSM just want to stay on thier story line.

Another quote, "trust but verify"

I think LarryR and Matt nailed it. To requote LarryR:

I think this is sort of like asking the question "What is the most important tool for building a house". The fact that the question is being asked shows a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue.

Not one job out there could or would exist without a plethora of others, also properly functioning. The entire system is inherently symbiotic and, even for a very specific task, different job roles are required at different stages.

Or, to put it another way -- what would happen if every janitor on earth vanished tomorrow morning? The best-case scenario is that other workers might ultimately find the keys to the broom closet and wipe down the toilets themselves with only a modest decline in productivity. Worst-case is a new disease epidemic.

But concomitantly, would those janitors be employed if it weren't for the dozens of other jobs taking place in a given commerical building?

Obviously, the most important profession is priest; by their sacrifices and incantations they prevent the gods from killing us all in a fit of pique. They prevent the hailstorms from ruining our crops, disease from harming our cattle, and floods from washing us away.

Alternately, judging by salary paid for work performed, perhaps action movie hero is top of the list?

As other have said, there're few sound reasons to judge one profession more important than others. I mean, if there were no tractor repairmen, the farmers couldn't farm, so obviously tractor repairmen are the most important group. But wait, they depend on tractor part salesmen...

- PJ/Maryland

Merchant.

Never underestimate the value of a good barkeep.

I vote for Norman Borlaug. Anybody who has fed a billion people has the most important job in the world.

Years ago this question was raised in an organic chemistry lecture I was at -- the professor wanted to make some pedagogically useful point or other -- and one fellow deftly proposed "animal husbandry", which stopped the conversation cold.

Mothers, idiots.

Yes, lots of professions are important in the sense that they are essential to building the house.

I'd like to substitute some different questions. Suppose that I'm a young unspecialized human being, and I'm deciding which profession(s) to specialize in, and my goal is to make a large marginal improvement in the state of the human race Or, suppose that I have surplus income, and I wish to donate some of my useful fungible money to other people to make large marginal improvements in the state of the human rac.

(The first supposition is no longer true, but the second supposition actually is true).

The question has an economic component (given specific goals, what is an efficient use of my money and time), but it transcends economics and has a moral dimenstion. What are my goals? What constitutes an improvement in the state of humanity?

Different people have different answers: an improvement in the state of the human race could be: a reduction in human suffering, or an increase in the number of happy humans, or a reduction in non-sustainable resource consumption, or an increase in human scientific understanding, or an increase in human artistic creations.

Personally, my goals for humanity are: (1) that every human lives as long as they want, and (2) that every human has as much freedom as they want.

I'm inclined to agree that in the previous century, (1) has best been served by engineers, some soldiers, and some medical researchers, and (2) has best been served by some soldiers, some lawyers, and many journalists.

I'd like to work up a "progress per dollar" metric across some of these fields, tuned to my personal preferences (which need some more development too). That is, where should I send my next marginal $100 in charity contributions?

That's the question I ponder. It's a variant of Jane's "what is important?" question, and it actually is a real question which demands an answer.

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