There is tremendous unique potential (geniuses, savants, etc.) being wasted right now due to poverty or socio-cultural repressiveness. Those one in a thousand or one in a million individuals who are stuck somewhere and unable to live up to even a fraction of their potential. Einsteins, chandras, or feynmans who will live their lives doing menial work in a ghetto in the developing world instead of advancing human civilization.
On the other hand, that perspective also downplays the contributions that "ordinary" people can make. And in a way reveals some of the deep seated classicism that exists in our culture today. The truth is, that if you can work a job at McDonalds (and almost everyone on Earth is capable of doing so) there is a ton of other work that you can do that is vastly more valuable. If you can work at McDonalds you can be a scientist, no joke, or an engineer, or an artist. Maybe you can't be einstein, but for every einstein in science there are thousands upon thousands of researchers whose jobs aren't that much more challenging than working a typical "service" job. And that kind of thing is as much how we cure cancer and build/better civilization as the work of geniuses.
Which, I think, puts the waste of work/talent from having so much of the workforce stuck in "menial" jobs in even greater perspective.