It's not a 0 dollar difference, that would be doing something not for money, but a huge negative difference is doing something for negative money. Bad idea IMHO. Life isn't a video game; you only get one play thru.

Somebody has to do it. We wouldn't have the civilization we have if we had no scientists. Similarly, we need teachers, caretakers, stay at home parents, and somebody has to repair the phone lines and pave the roads. If every person on the planet simply pursued the maximum pay career available to them, we wouldn't have much of a society at all.

You should certainly be aware of the financial sacrifice you're making to do socially impactful work and consider this in the decision calculus, but I don't think you can say zero people should ever make that decision.

Also, being told "should" by people about this life decision that means losing huge amounts of real money - opportunity cost is a real loss of money in economics - is really messed up in my opinion as someone who was in a PhD program for 3.5 years after college and lost over $400,000 over my lifetime as a result. People are always going around telling people what one "should" do about the PhD question as if it's some theoretical idealistic thing instead of a real actual person who's life is going to get impacted. It's like, who are you to tell anyone what they should do, let alone about something that will cost them so much? It's messed up. This is my opinion.

What do you feel has changed in the last 20 years? (This has been discussed a lot but my impression is that people compare today to the 1960s more than to the 00s).