A research scientist gets 28k a year........
You're getting scammed, mate! But, yeah, we are underpaid. I don't complain, though, because who isn't underpaid in the real world?
It's always struck me as perverse that there's a strong inverse correlation between someone's utility to society and their financial standing. Beneficiaries of aristocratic nepotism make up a good share of the richest people and most of them do nothing, making them worthless (unless you buy into the idea of trickle-down economics, but then you'd just be wrong and they'd still be worthless). Sportspeople, musicians, film stars etc.? Only a society of luxury (or of senselessness) could afford to make these people rich: their marginal benefit to society is contingent entirely on others having the free time and resources to expend on the frivolities they produce.
Successful entrepreneurs - the new rich, the self-made men - are an odd class because they deserve some degree of credit for their self-reliance, invention, and having presumably created jobs along the way. Then again, once they've "made it", most will happily pull the ladder up after them and start avoiding taxes and cutting every corner by automating as much as possible and employing as little as possible. And in modern society, most of their creations are every bit as frivolous as the movies made by the celebrity class.
California is full of tech millionaires or even billionaires whose ideas have had a net neutral or negative impact. I would suggest that not too many modern entrepreneurs have had an unequivocally positive instrinsic effect on society via their products (for every SatNav, there's been a thousand Tinders or selfie sticks inflicted upon the world), leaving only their job creation as an inherent good. And that's precarious: how moral is it really to create the opportunity for 10, 20 or even 2000 people to slave their lives away for minimum wage? Still, that's as much the fault of the system, ultimately, so entrepreneurs get a sort of half-pass up to a point.
I can respect a guy who has a good idea for a product that will be genuinely useful or helpful to people (without any of the remarkable hidden psychological downsides of something like Facebook) and then does all the things required (acquire seed capital, potentially remortgage his house etc.) to get that product into manufacturing and available for purchase. Inevitably, jobs will be created in that process. But - and I know I'm blaspheming the GDP money god here - I don't necessarily believe that guy is deserving of infinitely increasing wealth (at an infinitely increasing rate of increase) more than a decade down the line, after he's long since appointed a new CEO and gone off to live a life of decadence facilitated by his underpaid staff. Nevertheless, those are the prime directives, tenets and axioms of capitalism so we'll let him off the hook as the most productive and useful of all the millionaires.
The only other significant class of millionaires are the top decile of white-collar workers who best played the corporate climbing game and picked the right tree. Some of those people are straight-up parasites. Many, if not most, have a negative overall effect on society. Bankers? Nobody's forgotten 2008 just yet. Traders? Spending your days
literally making obscene amounts of money for someone else (and not even in the figurative sense of all capitalism -- a necessary caveat because of the way people use "literally" now).
CEOs and upper management? Aren't they the people everyone says are destroying the world, both metaphorically and literally? Those guys would mostly be serial killers if they weren't corporate overlords. They score remarkably highly, on average, on tests for narcissistic and psychopathic traits, which are useful for reaching the top in the first place (every book on mastering the corporate world is basically Applied Machiavelli).
In fact, those traits and those positions are probably predestined combinations: boards, and CEOs in particular, have a comparatively remarkable incidence of the uncommon "psychopath" allele of the gene encoding for the monoamine oxidase A enzyme, which causes a tendency towards psychopathy and has been found in many serial killers. If you have the allele and grow up in a loving and healthy family, the phenotype is blunted and you become the highly functional psychopath at the top of a large business; if you have the wrong epigenetic environment instead, you just become a serial killer. Of course, that's a crass generalisation but considering how generalised it is, it's amazing how true it is.
After the millionaires, you get to everyone in the real world, who, by twisted irony, are all the people who really make the world go round. Obviously you get millionaires in the traditional elite professions - doctors, lawyers etc. - but they're conditional: they become millionaires over the course of their lives if they treat their money wisely and don't behave like millionaires in their spending habits.
Doctors probably deserve it anyway: they take a decade from the best years of their lives to study and then perform a crucial high-pressure job. I know it's evergreen to rag on lawyers and I have no respect for the profession either but they're another of the (unfortunately necessary) pillars of society. The hourly rates of an average solicitor though..? Absolute vultures.
Meanwhile, at the bottom, we have basically everyone of foundational importance to.the everyday running and advancement of society. Teachers? A good one is more valuable to society than most of the above yet their ~£25k is hard to live on in many parts of the country. Emergency services personnel? They take risks, endure a ton of verbal and even physical abuse (from what my friends in those professions tell me), often work horrible hours including night shifts, and then die younger than expected with probably very little to their names.
Academics like me... Well, last year my work in neuroscience and psychiatry saved the life of a man in his 30s. I obviously love academia and couldn't imagine myself doing anything else, but let's just say that the administrative-corporate side of the university gets paid upto several times what the most senior professor gets (which seems insane to me but is a perfect example of how capitalism rewards those in charge rather than the actual source of value). Thinking about it, we're probably closer in pay and nature of work to the other traditional top-level professions than the traditional primary sector, though nobody gets six figures or particularly close.
Anyway, the people I really feel for are the minimum wage workers who keep everything afloat. When I worked at a supermarket, all I could think about the entire time I was there was the absolute absurdity of selling an hour of the most valuable and finite resource in the world for approximately £7 an hour. Time is something that people would kill for or spend billions on small amounts of. And yet many of us are asked to value an hour of our time at the same price as a coffee and a snack at Starbucks. You can work for an hour, often monotonous yet somehow still torturous labour, and then go across the road and consume your earnings within five minutes -- and that would just be called "lunch" (in other words, a necessity). Makes you sick when you really think about it. Maybe you won't want that slice of cake after all.
ETA: For what it's worth, I'm not necessarily against capitalism in principle nor am I necessarily a socialist, but I have to believe there's a system that works better than what we have now. I wouldn't mind experimenting with a rubber-banding ratio kind of approach where the highest paid employee at a company can only be paid a maximum of, say, five times more (including those godforsaken bonuses) than the lowest paid employee.
