I like the way you’re approaching the problem. However, I think the temptation for a familiar conclusion is too great and that you might be missing some possibilities.
See:
A lot of this just boils down to having an acceptable style guide that an editor can enforce without worrying >too much about taking every issue to the author for approval.
The solution you’re putting forth suggests that there needs to be a single person in charge of coalescing the many suggestions and edits.
But the great thing about version control is the ability to branch and tag. There could be an arbitrary number of editors who each have their own branch and set of improvements that they are working on—where non-editor contributors could switch branches and commit changes specific to that branch’s needs.
In the end, all branches would need to merge into the trunk. This process doesn’t necessarily need a single editor either.
Cheers
Chris, I appreciate your zeal and the argument you’ve formed given the information you have. You have correctly pointed out a fundamental logic flaw with the “get a job you love” mentality, and your alternative is certainly worthy of consideration.
As rational agents, we should be inclined to pick a model which is more robust to empirical data (given the same degrees of freedom). From your post I infer that you are not an economist, so you might be unfamiliar with the “Easterlin Paradox,” which shows that indeed wealthier people within a country are generally happier than poorer people of that same country, however, that relationship does not hold when we compare poorer countries with wealthier countries. In the context of your argument, this data implies that a person could just move to a country in which the job-they-love earns a higher income than the average of that country, thus maximizing both relative and total utility. This alternative requires less assumptions than your monetary targeting, and it is not bound by path dependent uncertainty. It is therefore more optimal.
But the interesting thought of “relative utility” only begins at that example. In the classical economic framework of absolute utility, it is deduced that riskier assets must be priced higher than less risky assets. Empirically it turns out that this is often not the case! The enlightening cognitive bias research of kahneman, tversky, and ariely (among others) in behavioral economics has put a spotlight on the exceptions to the classical view. And we now generally accept that people are “irrational” with respect to the mathematical definitions of the Hicksian synthesis — we try to explain the why.
Back to the original dilemma: should we optimize for money, or should we optimize for the job-we-love. The answer is inextricably dependent upon who we are going to compare ourselves to, whether consciously or not. I think this makes the problem much much harder than you imagined.