A cardiovascular surgeon is more valuable than Taylor Swift. So is a great third grade teacher. And the only reason that sentence sounds insane to you is the actual subject of this essay.
Stay with me.
The Prices We Already Know
Let’s do the math, because I always want to do the math
A song on Apple, if she even releases it there, costs about a dollar if even that much. If you listen to 200 songs per month at 14.99 then they are pennies.
An album runs you twenty. A concert ticket, the good kind, might run a few hundred. Add it up and you are still under the cost of a decent night out. A song is cheaper than a Big Mac. An album is cheaper than dinner at Olive Garden. A concert is a Disney day, maybe two.
None of it costs very much. Millions of people pay it anyway and that is the trick of how something that a person does not really value that highly can make a person a billionaire. It appeals to the masses for cheap. It is the hot coffee cup cardboard circle cup holder. For the same three minutes of music millions pay pennies. It adds up.
The surgeon charges a hundred and fifty thousand dollars for one procedure. One patient. One morning.
Multiply the cheap thing by millions and you beat the expensive thing by a mile. Taylor Swift is worth more than any surgeon alive, in dollars, and it isn’t close.
Here’s the part nobody says. She isn’t winning because the product is extraordinary. She’s winning because the product is cheap, and cheap scales, and a society addicted to convenience will buy an ocean of something disposable before it will properly pay for something rare. What is rare? What do we say we really value? I do not hear a lot of people saying that they want their third grader listening to Taylor Swift all day.
That’s not a compliment to the market. That’s an indictment of it.
The Trap Called Scale
Cost measures what something can extract at volume. It does not measure what something is worth.
A pop song asks almost nothing of you and gives back three minutes of a good feeling. And if it is catchy like on a warm summer’s evening on a train bound for nowhere then you have a great deal. But the dealin is done.
That’s the entire transaction, and there is nothing wrong with it. But stack a hundred million of those transactions and you get a fortune built on a product with a shelf life of one summer. The genius isn’t the song. The genius is the distribution.
The surgeon can’t distribute. A body only holds one heart, and one surgeon can only be in one operating room. The value she creates is enormous and it is capped by biology and by time.
She will never sell a hundred million of anything. She sells total, irreplaceable value to one person at a time, for as many hours as she has in a career, and then she’s out of inventory.
So when we say Taylor Swift is “worth more,” what we actually mean is her thing was buildable into a machine and the surgeon’s thing never will be. We’ve been grading value by how well it photocopies. That is not the same question as which one matters.
Now Imagine if the Teacher Could Scale
This is the part that should actually bother you.
A teacher spends a year handing thirty kids the tools to read, reason, and function as citizens. That is not a pleasant three minutes. That is the raw material of society.
She reaches thirty kids a year, for maybe thirty years. Call it nine hundred people, if she’s excellent and stays the whole career.
Now do the thought experiment with me. What if she could scale the way Taylor Swift scales? Not one classroom but to Fifty million kids with the same instruction at the same quality delivered everywhere at once.
Taylor Swift’s product doesn’t survive that comparison. It was never designed to. It was designed to be consumed, enjoyed, and replaced by the next one, and it is spectacular at that job. It was never doing the teacher’s job, and it was never trying to.
The Actual Diagnosis
So here’s the sentence I actually mean, not the softened version.
We didn’t decide the pop song was more valuable than the classroom. We decided that whatever can scale is more valuable than whatever can’t, and then we let the price tag pretend that was a judgment about worth instead of a judgment about logistics.
A cheap thing, multiplied, pretends to be value and somehow Taylor Swift can pretend to be a compass for society.
A profound thing, unscalable, buys a pension that barely covers the mortgage. But they do mold and shape generations and yet they disappear.
That’s not the market being wise. That’s the market measuring the one variable it knows how to measure, and calling it the whole truth.
I see the same mistake in my own business more often than I’d like to admit. A price tag on a house tells you what it will extract from a buyer. It tells you nothing about whether it’s actually worth it to the family standing in the kitchen. Cost is what scales. Value is what matters. The two keep getting filed under the same word, and every time they do, we reward the wrong thing and call it the market’s wisdom.
Go find the person in your life doing the unscalable, foundational work nobody prices correctly. Then ask yourself what she’d be worth if the world had simply built her a bigger microphone. And then go buy her a beach house.