They are knowingly trading the good feeling they get when helping people for the cash they could get by being a cold capitalist. You can make the argument social workers should be paid more but probably not the argument the person is employed in the highest saving ability profession they could reasonably hope to work in.
Same for entrepreneurs. What are the genius billionaires going to do if nobody wants to work for them and everybody wants to be an entrepreneur? We need to reward all kinds of useful jobs and not have all reward go to the sociopaths at the top.
As it stands individuals see the good feels as part of their wages. Otherwise they would do something higher paying. IF nobody does the job because the good feels does nothing for them then they'll have to start paying as much as the cold capitalist job.
Also, I think you're too hung up on "social work = good feels." Do fast food workers get good feels from their work?
And as an aside, very few people deliberately take a reduced fast food wage in the goal of helping others whereas a large number of our skilled and caring social workers knowingly entered social work knowing their college education could be used for higher paying endeavors.
And I would be very curious to hear some suggestions for jobs a social worker could get without any additional training that pay better than social work. NYC requires posting salaries in job openings, so with a suggested job alternative, we can easily find if there are many job openings for the new line of work and whether or not the job would pay materially better than social work.
Which leads me to my response:
>What are all the capitalists going to do if everybody wants to go for the big bucks and not do things like social work, nursing and many other jobs?
Well if what rcme says is true, they're being paid the top dollar of anybody with their skills... that kind of answers the question. They're at the biggest buck profession they can get (remember rcme thesis is they don't have the resources to retrain or whatever) therefore the profession will still exist.
Who would be in charge of identifying who gets that money and managing the systems that distribute that money and would they get paid more than the social workers that got fired?
My prediction is especially neglect but also abuse are often symptoms of poverty and insufficient economic security. I do not believe economically starving the parents is somehow going to help the neglect of overburdened parents, but I can respect some possible hints that may be drawn from your question. My belief is the number of kids saved through such a measure would outdo the number the social workers would have saved. But that is just a theory.