In this short essay I will observe a downside of comparative advantage — comparative advantage being an extremely useful and wonderful concept from economics. (As for myself, understanding comparative advantage has helped me 1. make sense of the world and 2. stop beating myself up that I'm not simultaneously doing every job (it's weird that I felt that way anyway!). Also, 3. not be mad that some people do a bad job at their jobs sometimes.) The downside is a non-economic downside; a moral or axiological downside whereby we lose out on something good, that probably isn't captured by money. It's probably still less important than the value we gain, that IS captured by money, though.

It is excellent when the excellent excel excellently. All people tend to realize this, to be stirred by its beauty and greatness. Its magnificence. Even useless tasks can impress when done with great skill. And the useful even more so.

If you follow your comparative advantage, which you should generally do, it is quite possible that you will pursue some task you are good at but not the one you are most excellent at — this is one of the factors that makes it "comparative" advantage instead of "absolute" advantage. In short you will do this because it's more valuable to society (others and yourself) to do that which you are merely good at, probably because a large mass of people can do the thing you are excellent at well enough, and the skill you are good at is rare. (There could be other reasons, as well.) And this is probably the right move. But it does mean the world will lose out on your exercising the highest excellence possible to you in some domain. Which is, in fact, a loss of some sort.

(Living, itself, is the pursuit in which you should try to apply the greatest excellence, and this pursuit subsumes all others, and thus will probably direct you to follow your comparative advantage — it is quite possibly more excellent for your life overall to be a good software engineer than an excellent juggler (although— perhaps not!))

Of course, if people really wanted to see you perform excellently enough, they could pay for you to do it (or pay by opportunity cost). So perhaps it is already priced in.

This occurred to me during my discussion with a friend, the great Jason, about a mutual friend, the largest Nick, who would have written great histories but instead is maintaining fortran programs for a living. From which I jokingly concluded that it turns out FORTRAN is more valuable than history :)