Take a look at the current output of how people spend their lives, especially in the Western world. What do they spend their time doing, why do they do so, and what do they do with their income/wealth and resulting rewards?
On an axis of jobs "essential or tangibly useful to society" on x and "compensation" on y, we see that it is almost a negative linear function. The NY garbage workers, who when they go on strike for 3 days the entire city shuts down, are paid a rate that post-taxes and with NYC standard of living is near zero savings or pleasure spending. Daycare workers, nurseries, teachers for small and medium children, who all do the most important human task of educating and domesticating the next generation get paid poverty wages — often to the point where most such workers are either already wealthy, retirees or old people, or on welfare and barely making ends meet. Yet the average accountant, without whom surely most companies would pay more taxes, is compensated like a king (above the 70,000 happiness index for sure, not counting bonuses and lifestyle and business expenses and supposed career trajectory and prestige).
Because of the Puritanical work culture that founded the country, it seems that there is almost a ceiling to the level of utility that can be gotten from a job. If it is derived from the usefulness and purposefulness of the work (social workers, those making daily lives significantly better), society in some way has determined that there should be less monetary compensation. IN general, the trend is more uselessness or suffering warrants more compensation. And, the few people and jobs who have the luxury of impact and wealth are 1) in very scarce jobs (model human rights lawyer, ESG investor in NYC) and 2) heavily gatekeeped jobs (old money making itself more interesting for socialization and dinner parties).
It seems, when looking at outcomes, that "one is not paid money to do things, however useful or important, that one actually enjoys or derives meaning from"... instead, one is compensated because they are intentionally NOT deriving joy or meaning. They are being paid because they suffer, and if they chose not to suffer their new job would not pay nearly as much.
This is highlighted by the rise of administration — and the Obama standard of saying "if we fix healthcare and all the costs by rightfully eliminating 2-3 million middlemen and note takers and price approvers, then what would all those people do?" So it's not a market that exists because of efficiency or even value. It's a universal awareness of perpetuating BS and inefficiency and as a direct result, not helping people, because without it god forbid there would be less need to work.
Public discourse rooted from the base assumption of "people will become parasites and completely unproductive if left to their own devices or given access to the basic needs". But, economic model doesn't apply to reality —- entire UBI idea is not that people don't want to work, but people want to work at the things they like to work in. In fact, if a society has people not working at things they hate and that are unnecessary, then the people will likely rejoice in their ability to do the things they love. Prison example: most cherished tasks are the supposedly useless jobs/work (where you don't get paid/can't keep pay) like librarian, prison laundry, cleaning, etc. Without this labor or daily purpose, prisoners go insane and feel far more punished — even if it is not personally useful work, it is cherished because it is USEFUL. People want to be USEFUL while generating wealth, not only after they have it.
Typical peasants/serfs worked only a few hours a day normally (outside of harvest/specific seasons where it was all day of brutal labor, which came down to maybe a month-1.5 months max a year). This is WAY less total work than the perennial 9-5 grind minus some days or weeks.
MODERN MORALITY: NOT THAT YOU "SHOULD" BE WORKING, BUT THAT YOU SHOULDN'T BE DOING ANYTHING ELSE
The concept of OWNING someone else's time is a really new one. Indignity ensues when you pay someone a salary and they goof off not because they didn't do the job (could have finished it super fast), but that you paid for not their OUTPUT but their input time. If they are efficient, you pay them more and still own their time. Or you make them sort paper clips and make copies and write emails. "If a Greek or Roman saw a potter, he could imagine buying his pots or buying the potter (slavery). But he would have been baffled at the notion that he might buy the potter's time!" The distinction of labor/capital as inputs by hours and sole outputs of individuals is a very new, dehumanizing, and ECONOMIC concept that is not good for society.
There are many ways to make a human feel unworthy. Versions include "rights scoling" by saying people are stupid for thinking the world or society owes them anything. On the left, it's "check your privilege" for demanding things when people in other places don't even have the basics.
Even worse is people going into things to help others and finding out they are actively hurting (iatrogenics of NGOs, government paperwork, etc). Doing paperwork that results in human damage, educating kids that end up becoming just learned enough to abandon their families and waste away in big cities, being the agents of denial of services because of paperwork or government restrictions.
What level does morality and desire have to play in wealth? A child born to similar conditions in Sweden vs the US has completely different %s of becoming wealthy. Does this mean the Swedes are more moral/more entrepreneurial/harder working? Or is it a result from things like the level of lowest poverty that is acceptable. THE QUESTION OF WHY ONE PLAYER WON A GAME RATHER THAN ANOTHER IS DIFFERENT FROM THE QUESTION OF HOW HARD THE GAME IS TO PLAY.
Why aren't we as a country ASHAMED to the point of immovable force that we have homeless people? Homeless veterans?
Why is is that there aren't 4 day workweeks if so many things have been automated away? We have collectively decided as a society that its better to have 10s of millions of lives spent pretending and creating/analyzing/processing useless data and files rather than just enable people to not have to suffer for compensation.
Value vs Values. The market value of a commodity is based on currency, on exchange. This is why in the world of values, the question of price is irrelevant and the point of "pricelessness" actually matters. Would be bizarre to ask or say that a monk or certain prayer is "5x" more worth than another one. Or one Picasso piece is "3x more artistic" than another one. Quantification = valuation, but not everything can be quantified or can retain its meaning if it is quantified. You can derive numbers from art, but you can't create art from the same numbers.
Life is ambiguously divided between values and value, yet we focus all of our energy on the economic latter.
Lockwood Nathanson economic paper == spillover effects/externalities of each profession, # of value added to world for every # of compensation —> medical researchers +9, schoolteachers +1, consultants net 0, managers -.8, financial sector -1.5.
GA Cohen philosophy of societal equality: