If the meaningful work you want to do is in education or environment... There is basically no well paying jobs.
There's no business profit in clean water or air, so capitalism doesn't cover the need. The fact there might be no customers in an area in 50 years is outside the scope of economic patterns. In 40-45 years all the current business leaders will have their pockets lined & be retired... and new leaders will beg the government to fix "the problem no one saw coming"... Shifting businesses profits today for taxpayer-funded fixes later for "economic revitalization" or "environmental repairs"
On top of these issues... if you have bills, you often can't take a pay cut to pull this off. I'd be willing to take a pay cut for meaningful work, but it would still need to cover child care and rent. My wife looked at jobs with the EPA, they offered $50k for masters degree and 8 years of experience. A single family home on 1/5th acre is $500k+. If we both did meaningful work we could not live there, let alone have kids ($1250/month child care).
We decided we just couldn't do meaningful work in the DC area and left. This stinks because we really need to be worried about this stuff for our children's future. But as long as private industry pays 50-75% more, the rising costs of everything to accommodate those well paying jobs chokes out teachers, environmental workers, and low-wage retail jobs (aside from kids still living at home)
> If the meaningful work you want to do is in education or environment... There is basically no well paying jobs.
Lambda School is an existence proof that you can do good and make money in education. Minerva University looks pretty good too. Udacity and Coursera are helping and have helped a ton of people as well. When I was a kindergarten teacher I used Starfall.com all the time. Mathletics and ixl.com come highly recommended by friends who teach primary school. Outschool.com are working on a teacher student marketplace for classes. Baselang.com is the best place to learn Spanish on the internet, hands down. Italki.com is a pretty good marketplace for language lessons too.
You can’t do much with schools really because schools are run for the benefit of teachers not students but if you want to help students there’s a lot to be done in education, and plenty of people doing it.
I just don't agree with this viewpoint at all. There are plenty of profitable startups directly focused on education and the environment. Maybe you don't agree with their definition of meaningful but don't let perfect be the mortal enemy of better.
whatever meaningful means to you should be a highly personal measure, not the classic, obvious societal ones. It also helps if the macro-benefit of the act is a symptom of the behaviour vs. the goal. example: I ride a bike to work everyday because it's fun, good for me and cheaper than driving. I dn'to it primarily because it's good for the planet, but hey, it's a nice bonus. We need to look for lots of opportunities that do good for others as a consequence of doing well for ourselves, not a subsistute.
There's no business profit in clean water or air, so capitalism doesn't cover the need. The fact there might be no customers in an area in 50 years is outside the scope of economic patterns. In 40-45 years all the current business leaders will have their pockets lined & be retired... and new leaders will beg the government to fix "the problem no one saw coming"... Shifting businesses profits today for taxpayer-funded fixes later for "economic revitalization" or "environmental repairs"
On top of these issues... if you have bills, you often can't take a pay cut to pull this off. I'd be willing to take a pay cut for meaningful work, but it would still need to cover child care and rent. My wife looked at jobs with the EPA, they offered $50k for masters degree and 8 years of experience. A single family home on 1/5th acre is $500k+. If we both did meaningful work we could not live there, let alone have kids ($1250/month child care).
We decided we just couldn't do meaningful work in the DC area and left. This stinks because we really need to be worried about this stuff for our children's future. But as long as private industry pays 50-75% more, the rising costs of everything to accommodate those well paying jobs chokes out teachers, environmental workers, and low-wage retail jobs (aside from kids still living at home)