An actor makes $20 million for one film. A nurse who literally keeps people alive makes a fraction of that in a decade. Is this just how value works, or is something deeply broken?
Join the debate to comment
Reading is free. Members pay to post — that's why it stays clean.
Add your commentA nurse saves your life. A teacher shapes your kid. An actor pretends for a camera. Tell me again how the market is a perfect measure of 'value,' I could use the laugh.
as a nurse: i didnt do it for the money and im glad someone said the actor isnt my enemy. but i AM tired of being called a hero while being denied a raise. you cant pay rent in applause
my mum is a nurse and reading this thread made me cry a little. she gives everything and comes home with nothing left and we call that normal. it shouldnt be normal
Teacher here. Made peace with it years ago. I'll never be rich but I watched a kid who couldn't read in September finish a novel in May. Try buying that feeling with a movie salary.
with respect, 'the feeling is the reward' is literally the story they tell underpaid people so they accept less. you deserve the feeling AND a living wage. dont let them give you one to deny you the other
The uncomfortable truth: society pays for what it can't easily replace and what it desperately wants to consume. We SAY we value nurses. We SPEND on entertainment. Watch what people do, not what they post.
Everyone agrees nurses deserve more. Nobody agrees to the higher taxes or hospital bills that would actually pay for it. We want the outcome without the price. That's the part we never debate honestly.
people dont pay for 'value to society', they pay for scarcity and attention. millions can do nursing. almost no one can sell 50 million cinema tickets. thats the brutal economics whether you like it or not
I'll say the thing everyone's dancing around. We don't actually value caregiving because historically it was unpaid women's work, and that wage shadow never went away. That's the real root.
'You can't pay rent in applause' is going straight into my brain forever. That's the whole problem in six words.
The market isn't moral. It never claimed to be. It pays for what's scarce and wanted. The mistake is expecting a pricing mechanism to also be a justice system. Those are our jobs, through policy.
the actor doesnt take money FROM the nurse though. that 20 million comes from studios and fans. underpaying nurses is a separate scandal with separate villains (hi, hospital execs and budgets)
Right but who DECIDED that selling tickets is worth a thousand times more than saving a child? That's not a law of physics, it's a choice we keep making and pretending is natural.
Half of them have teams whose entire job is to make sure they pay as little tax as legally possible, so let's not hand out halos too fast.
and whose fault is the 'cant easily replace' part? we made nursing replaceable by refusing to pay for it, so people leave, so we import more, so wages stay low. its a designed shortage not a natural one
Finally someone said it. These two problems get welded together emotionally but they have nothing to do with each other. Capping actor pay would not put one extra dollar in a nurse's pocket.
nah lots of male-dominated essential jobs are underpaid too (farm workers, sanitation, care for the elderly). its not gender, its that 'essential' and 'profitable' are just two different things and we pay for profit
athletes too. dude kicks a ball and makes more in a week than a surgeon makes in a year. and somehow we all just accept it because the ball is fun to watch
That surgeon will never generate a billion dollars of economic activity, jobs, tourism and tax revenue for a city the way a superstar club does. Spectacle is an industry, not just 'a guy kicking a ball.'
celebrities also fund a LOT through taxes and charity that nurses cant. one a-lister's tax bill could fund a small clinic. its more complicated than 'they bad we good'
Is 'Sinners' the most important Black American film in a decade, or is the vampire metaphor just Hollywood dressing up history to make it palatable?
38 comments
Netflix's 'Adolescence' shows a teenage boy becoming a killer — did the show actually get modern boyhood right, or did it miss the point entirely?
38 comments
Is MLS actually a serious league now, or is it still just a retirement home for aging superstars?
25 comments
Ronaldo or Messi: be honest, who is the actual GOAT?
24 comments