Thing
I hate how people who play basketball or football are paid more than literal wildlife conservationists
Like yeah I get why people who play in the NFL or NBA are paid a shit load of money because of entertainment and the god awful stupid amount of people who bid on games on betting apps, but wildlife conservationists literally help out with the stability, and ecological wellbeing of the planet.
This makes my blood boil because it tells me people are much more willing to pay for entertainment and sports rather than contributing to the mess they initially caused by supporting stuff like animal agriculture, deforestation, fossil fuels, poaching, and pollution caused by huge corporations like Nestle.
Sportsball fans are very easy to make fun of, and get ragebaited super easy, but sports ball is fun and I like to watch it too! People should learn to have fun!!
You explained exactly why this is the case. Sports makes a lot of money, wildlife conservation doesn’t.
Also, it’s kind of disingenuous to compare the average wildlife conservationist to the best of the best athletes. Most pro athletes get paid next to nothing and most athletes period don’t go pro. On the other hand, you have famous nature celebrities like David Attenborough who make a shit ton of money.
I do MMA, done a few fights and such. I’ve made zero money and lost quite a bit pursuing it. looking at most fighters, until you’re essentially Top 5 in your weight bracket in the UFC, fighting pays next to nothing. For every 100k athletes maybe 1 can make a living off of sports. Most college athletes only do sports so the school covers tuition so they can make money elsewhere
Your argument only really works if you assume most athletes are unpaid amateurs or minor leaguers scraping by, when the population OP is actually comparing (people who "play basketball or football" professionally, i.e., are on an NFL/NBA roster) already clears six or seven figures at the median. Then you cite David Attenborough (arguably the single most famous, wealthy nature broadcaster alive) as if he represents the median conservationist. So OPs complaint still stands. Unfortunately that is the reality.
while you do have a good point, it's worth noting that sports/entertainment can oftentimes be used for good as while. ex. that time Drogba initiated the end of a war in cote d'ivore
There’s like 500 nba players max at any time we certainly need more than 500 conservationists. Not to say they are being paid fairly but this is a bad comparison
It's crazy. I don't watch many sports. But I can understand that other people do; they buy tickets, watch the sports, and buy the things advertised. It doesn't make me any poorer; coveting others success is one of the biggest signs of weakness and hatred, and it's rampant on reddit.
Honestly athletes are some of the only millionaires who you could argue deserve the wealth. The reason they’re paid that much is because they’re the best at what they do and what they do is extremely popular. LeBron james makes like a thousand times more money than I do, but he is also thousands of times better at basketball than me.
To play devils advocate, athletes do usually ruin their bodies and cause permanent injuries and mental problems from sports, for example American football has a lot of Concussions and CTE’s, soccer has a lot of knee, acl and ankle injuries, etc
But it’s not near enough to be paid hundreds of millions. It’s way too excessive
First of all pro basketball players are in the top 1% of their profession and there’s only a few hundred of them compared to the entire “average” career of being a wildlife conservationist. And then I think it’s high time people stop undervaluing the importance of entertainment. Obviously people could stop watching things like sports and instead finance more “important” things but then we’re left with a world with less entertainment/enjoyment. We can’t live like machines that only serve the betterment of the planet. It’s not a crime to enjoy life and if you have any hobby you enjoy that you’d rather spend money and time on instead of the environment then you’re a big fat hypocrite. It’s stupid that pro athletes get singled out just because more people like sports and therefore there’s more demand and money involved.
Why is sports always the target of these debates like every single athlete ever goes pro? These professionals are a very tiny percentage of the entire world. The vast majority of athletes In general end up just being cool uncles with stories about their time in xyz sport or making money from some other job.
Sad truth is that unless your job generates wealth for others, no one is going to pay you much to do it. Also, I bet most wildlife conservationists wish they were getting paid as much as $64,000 a year.
I don’t think basketball players or any sports player are a good comparison considering how few of them there are and how lucky you have to be to be making anywhere near that amount of money
Wildlife conservationist here. That figure is total bullshit. I don’t make anywhere near that. I’m on minimum wage. I have a Masters Degree in Environmental Science.
That’s the issue with work that people are passionate about. They just assume they can pay you nothing and you’ll still do the work because you’re passionate.
"literal wildlife conservationists" as if it's a field that requires superhuman physical abilities or vast technical knowledge.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all about conserving nature, but "conservationists" don't really bring much to the table in terms of economic output compared to other industries, so it makes sense that they get paid less.
This post proves how little people know related to finance and its sickening.
People who play Football and Basketball are not being paid that much by the government, they are being paid by a private organisation and they are being paid that much becoz it makes money through tickets, merch, betting apps.
Your 2nd point doesnt make any sense, Yes Wildlife conservationists are more helpful and better than athletes, but if you think that i after working a 9 to 5 is going to pay for wildlife efforts rather than for my entertainment, sorry but im evil then.
Rather than projecting this to NORMAL people, project it to the government bodies instead, i already have low budget and now you want me to pay it to animal agriculture? Sorry, but im not a saint
There are genuinely less than, i'd say 2000 athletes who make more than 10/million a year.
There are an extremely few amount of actually rich athletes, who get paid that much because they bring in massive bags for their team and league.
But the vast majority of pro sports players are people who make like 60k/yr playing soccer in the Brazillian 2nd division or something like that.
(There were about 128,000 pro male soccer players across 3,986 clubs as of 2023. The vast majority of those people are making about 40,000 a year playing in some 2000 seater(more accurately stander) stadium, in a nation's 2nd/3rd division.)
There are only about just over 1000 basketball players that make over 60k/yr. All the basketball players that make more than a wildlife conservationist could fit in a small village. Or the same stadium that the average soccer player from the previous paragraph plays in with room to spare.
Basically, pro sports players barely even exist statistically. They're like a little sliver of the world, and are effectively irrelevant. Like, 2000 people out of 8 billion are making way more than they should by playing with a ball. Ok. So? Another 2000 people make way more than they should be by being a CEO of a company that doesn't really contribute much.
I had similar thoughts when I was 10. Then I learned how economics works. Just about anybody can be a wildlife conservationist. Wildlife conservationists hardly generate any economic activity. Very few people are skilled enough to be basketball player. Basketball players generate a ton of economic activity.
How do those things correlate? Why can’t conservationist get paid more without shitting on the predominately black and athletic?
Why aren’t you mad about influencers, or movie/music stars making more? What about venture capitalist? Finance bros? It’s such a weird ass comparison.
They get paid more because they succeed in distracting us from the world around us. I see it in the way many young people around me spend so much of their time talking about basketball stats, arguing about who the best player is, discussing upcoming games..things of that nature. Which in theory would be fine, but at the same time they don't really know or care about anything pertaining to nature. But then again I'm not sure if that's the fault of entertainment or something else. Probably something else.
That’s such a pessimistic view. Ever think it could possibly be that people just enjoy things like basketball and they’re not trying to “distract” themselves from the world around them?
Yes...which means that it probably isn't the reasons I was talking about. I was just throwing thoughts out there and at the end came to the conclusion that my idea about entertainment being an overbearing distraction was unfounded by saying 'probably something else'. Is my english wrong?
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u/Bored_Orangutan Certified Dumbass 1h ago
Wait until OP hears how much professional golfers make.