What I meant by social problem for some people are things impacting their happiness and quality-of-life, reducing suffering, etc. Some examples to narrow down the possibility space:

- Make it so that people in your community have access to clean water. Surprisingly, it's a problem even in the most advanced countries.

- Contribute to something in healthcare that reduces costs, improves availability, or makes more people survive a procedure, an illness, etc.

- Make firefighting safer, or more efficient. Make it less needed in the first place.

- Make the air clearer. Make the energy cheaper. Make the roads better and safer. Etc.

- (Meta) make the market less ennui-generating.

I found that "what pays" is not a good proxy, because often what pays best is solving problems for a group of people, which also generate further problems for other groups of people. Usually, the benefits for the first group are purely financial.

To use a simple example - advertising. There's lots of people who would pay you for your work in this space, because your work will earn them more money. What your work will do downstream, however, is most likely one of those:

- It'll create more work for someone else to cancel the effects of your work; a lot of advertising is playing a zero-sum game, i.e. simply wasting natural resources and human time. (Conversely, often your work is only needed to cancel out the effect of someone else's efforts.)

- It'll disturb the market, promoting a worse solution over a better solution, leading customers to make wrong choices, and thus lose some amount of money and/or happiness.

- It'll add to the noise we all have to endure, also slowly eroding happiness.

Occasionally, you might end up promoting the right thing to the right crowd for the right reasons, but I doubt that happens very often ;).

Conversely to all of that, I feel that solving what I see as "social problems" pays less, if at all, again making "what pays" a bad proxy towards finding ways to address those problems.

Is your room clean?

It's a somewhat serious, somewhat tongue-in-cheek question. But if you need to clean your room, maybe you should do that first. Instead of having grandiose visions of improving things at large scale, prove to yourself you can improve things at a local scale and keep them that way.

If that sort of thinking is interesting, there's a whole book of it in https://jordanbpeterson.com/12-rules-for-life/ Though I'll say I got out of the existential and nihilistic mindsets differently, I don't feel like I have to wrestle with meaningness like I used to, before I ever heard of the author, I've just read good-sounding things from people who have read that book or have otherwise gotten themselves invested in the author's doings.

I suspect you've read this before but if not, point 5 might resonate with you: http://coding.derkeiler.com/Archive/Lisp/comp.lang.lisp/2006... If you fit the mold and can't change your mindset then you'll forever be unhappy unless you manage to get one of those "interesting" jobs.

A good list. But we have no time to work on social innovation until the bigger problems of tongue detection are solved: https://images.anandtech.com/doci/12870/Screenshot_113.png

What about people with lots of problems and not a lot of money?

For some reason, I still think they have value and that their problems are worth solving, regardless of what the market thinks of them.

Solving them at scale can still lead to money. Sometimes they are willing to give you a little money, sometimes others are (governments, or even businesses if it can lead to profit for them. I.e., low income training + job search with recruiter fee could be profitable). Or if you're addressing the problem of they have little money, by giving them skills or opportunities, you can charge after you help them (i.e., many coding bootcamps that delay costs until you land something)

This still asserts that solving the problems of a poor person is worth less than solving the problems of a rich person.

Also, getting paid by the government to do something is decisively a non-market solution, given that the government gets its money through taxes.

I can provide examples:

Panera Bread gross revenue $2.8B, McDonalds gross revenue $22.8B

Nordstrom gross revenue $14.4B, Walmart gross revenue $500.3B

Payday loan revenue in the rich burbs roughly-zero, Payday loan revenue nation wide mysteriously between $6B and $46B depending on data source

Now can you get a cool and trendy very high social status hipster job to brag about on social media in the coolest office with only the best "personality fit" coworkers helping poor people, oh heck no you'd be savaged here if you admitted to working for McD, but the market of poor people products, at least in some areas of business, is about ten times as large as rich people products.

There are a hell of a lot more poor people than there are rich people.

It’s also a hell of a lot easier to take advantage of them, given they generally lack the education or resources to protect themselves from predatory businesses. I struggle to think of McDonald’s as “helping” poor people. It’s putting food in their mouths, yes, but if McDonald’s were more concerned with the health and financial wellbeing of their customers as opposed to exploiting psychology to get as many people to impulse buy as much junk food as possible it would be an incredibly different company.

The goal of a company is not “help” its customers, the goal of a company is to exploit any and every untapped source of wealth. If it can do that by hurting someone who doesn’t know better, it is going to.

> Payday loan revenue in the rich burbs roughly-zero, Payday loan revenue nation wide mysteriously between $6B and $46B depending on data source

Payday loans may "solve a problem" but they do it in a predatory and exploitative way.

Your first statement seems to imply that the market is flawed (because, obviously, the willingness to pay for something is going to be higher for someone with lots of money than someone with little), the second seems to imply that there is something inherently beneficial in focusing on 'market solutions' as you define them. These views are rather at odds with each other.

But, I'm not trying to comment on either of those, just that you can create utility for a poor person and still have a viable business. If it relies on government for funding, because society has decided it's worth funding that sort of work, so what? We have an entire defense industry in the US based on that idea. Most of our education is too. Other countries have their entire healthcare systems based on that idea. You can decide you don't want to be paid directly by taxed money, but that's on you, not on the viability of such a model.

To be clear, I’m criticizing the common notion that the market is inherently beneficial or that it contains the solutions to all problems (though I don’t mean to accuse you of holding such views). Some problems necessarily require non-market solutions.

Mother Teresa's contributions to poor ppl of the world were minuscule compared to Bill Gates.

Don't forget the damage done to everyone (incl. poor people) by Gates' predatory business practices.

Or the damage done to everybody, particularly the poor, from MT's "suffering is Christ like" mentality.

My point is, you have to compare them entirely. At least Gates seems to have moved into the "good" quadrant later in life.

That's not the only way to make money, though. A big problem with modern corporate capitalism is how abstract everything is: you're rarely getting paid directly by someone you're doing a favor for. Now it's more like, the corporation you work for holds money in investments, which gain value as the stock prices of an actively managed portfolio of other corporations changes, and a portion of that value is paid out as salaries to employees, who work to raise the stock price, so other corporations will buy more shares of your corporation, which raises the stock price of your corporation…