I’m not disagreeing this is painting it black and white — but as a scientist I know and respect a lot of folks who make big money and absolutely could not work a customer service job. Being helpful even when peopel are awful, solving problems on your feet and dealing with an ever shifting landscape of other people’s feelings and expectations is work and takes skills, they just aren’t ones we give degrees for.

David, I think you’re misunderstanding a short opinion piece for something else. And being a good crossing guard involves more than just flipping a sign and I bet a lot of neurosurgeons or whatever would be shitty at it. Interestingly, both jobs involve safeguarding people’s lives but in the US, one is valued and the other is dismissed (as you have demonstrated).

"folks who stand all day holding a stop/go sign that requires no more skill than turning the sign when signaled"

As someone who lives in a rural area with a majority of roads being two lanes and also a majority of road work condensed in a few months of hot summer weather, I really really want the people who are flagging to perform their job with professionalism and the requisite skill, even if that skill appears to be minimal to others. The alternative is a head-on crash.

I would have agreed with this sentiment maybe a decade or two ago, but I no longer believe that contemporary market economies are able to adjudicate the value of labour accurately, or even reasonably, without some kind of impartial external control.

“Some jobs are harder than others and so should be better compensated” is straightforward in principle, but in reality remuneration leads to political influence, which leads to power, which leads to control over the definition of “skilled” or “unskilled” labour. You only need to consider the infamous trillion-dollar pay package to see how far this stuff has departed from reality.

Definitions of “skill” end up stretched to cover all kinds of things that are required to protect the holders of capital or political power, and not to benefit human society or the world we live in. Many people are paid more to do nasty/cruel/unethical things, because they’re nasty/cruel/unethical. That’s a stupid incentive structure.

It’s easy to bring up examples of noble jobs that ought to be paid well, but that ignores where most of the money actually goes. Do neurosurgeons and quantum physicists etc deserve to be well compensated due to the complexity and importance of their jobs? Most likely, yes. Do CEOs and hedge fund managers, etc? Much more debatable. Personally, I’ve never met one whom I consider to be worthy of their pay.

The problem is that we’re expecting the basic principle of higher skill = higher compensation to play out according to a bunch of ideal incentives that simply do not apply to human society. The solution is likely to be state control of remuneration and/or a much more stringent taxation regime, but we’ve blindly followed the pied pipers of “meritocracy” and “free markets”
for so long that it’s very hard to imagine us clawing back enough power for humanity as a whole.

Like the communists, we’ve wasted time and effort on economic structures designed for angels and not humans. It’s hopelessly naïve and simplistic.