Well, we already have a system that rewards “valuable” contributions: Money.
Just a lot of people don’t like that system much, as it turns out that system places little value on childcare, elder care and teaching; and huge value on executives who are fired for sexual harassment. Which doesn’t line up very precisely with a lot of people’s personal values.
It's hard even to find a way to buy "Great childcare and elder care". Mostly you end up paying as much as such a thing should cost but the money just goes to people who "administer" minimum wage workers delivering care that is mediocre at best.
What you comment sounds unlikely to me.
When your kids are still infants, at childcare centers, the caretaker:child ratio can get as high as 1:2. Those caretakers gross nearly $30k/year plus benefits & other employer costs such as FICA & Medicare.
> Just a lot of people don’t like that system much
Any other system would be more centralized, and even more open to abuse.
As they say: "Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all the others."
It's the same with money.
> places little value on childcare, elder care and teaching
Those things have a completely different problem: Those benefiting from them are not those paying for them.
a charitable reading of the parent comment would find they're mainly against centralization of authority rather than how to value intangibles or how to engineer fairness into economic systems.
but their first assumption that "'socially valuable contributions' [...] implies there's some sort of authority" is wholly unsupported. capitalism, for example, highly values rational resource distribution, but there is no central authority dictating that distribution.
in any case, the crux of the problem is that with concentration of wealth comes concentration of power. we're all very wary of concentrations of power, for good reason. we need to decouple that pairing for a more stable and balanced society.
Revealed preferences also show that what people say they want and what they actually want can be quantified very precisely using money as a proxy. And more generally, the vast majority of consumers show they prefer low prices over all other things, including priced in externalities, bad labor and management practices, unsustainable production etc...
More recently however (~100 years) the advertising and marketing industry has shown that preference hijacking is a real thing, so markets are skewed in this way.