Our economic systems are lopsided. A professional tennis star — like Roger Federer — gets paid millions while a professional border patrolman gets paid in the mere thousands.
Perhaps in the earliest periods of civilization this wasn’t the case. Perhaps many thousands of years ago, soldiers got paid much more than artists and entertainers. (Or perhaps not).
But right now, entertainers get paid several times that of other “normal” workers in the society (barring top executives of some private companies).
Put this way, it sounds like entertainment is valued more than security. But this can’t be true. After all, for every Roger Federer, there are millions of unknown, unpopular, unprofessional and usually impoverished tennis players. So what is it that makes Roger Federer so worthy, economically?
Excellence.
We, as people, don’t pay for the entertainment alone. We pay not just to watch two tennis stars hit the ball across court and outsmart each other. We pay to watch the excellence of two craftsmen. What makes these star players worth so much economically is not that they are entertainers but that they are living proof of human excellence that all of us wish for but very few achieve.