This is how I feel coming from the trades into the offices, my colleagues are often surprised when I say the work we do is easy.
Private Equity is explicitly excluded, maybe they do, who knows?
Example 1 Bill Gates/Microsoft: Provided a stable platform for business software to run on, making it possible for millions of businesses to do accounting/inventory management/controlling CNC machinery/etc.
Example 2 Sales People/Marketing: If you got the best product/software/whatever but zero customers, how are you you gonna pay your bills?
[edit]
Example 3 Jeff Bezos: Building the dominant platform for e-commerce of all kinds. Making it easy for a huge crowd of potential customers to discover and buy your wares.
Office workers earn more because they do jobs more similar to the jobs of those who allocate money.
I would say office work does not actually pay more, it depends. Easy office-hand jobs probably pay much less than your previous job... but when it does pay more, it's simply because there's fewer people willing and capable of doing that job as a rate of the number of people actually needed for such tasks.
When a job is regulated (requires license, or is protected by some law etc) the equation is skewed, usually in favour of a profession.
Supply vs demand dynamics very much do exist. I get paid a lot, I also create measurably more than my salary in value.
Desire is mimetic: you demand what you see others demanding. 99% of everything is either a layer of misdirection or support infrastructure for a layer of misdirection.
I have friends who change between different types of jobs, and their reasons are often surprising.
Consider a person that carves bespoke wooden figurines. Their job takes considerable skill, even talent. But it takes then X hours to make Y figurines. Time in, widgets out, completely proportional.
Now imagine a person that configures a robot to carve crappy mass produced figurines. Their work is differently skilled, but perhaps less so. The product isn't as good. Yet they put in their time once and the machine cranks out enormous quantities with minimal additional work from them. This has high leverage, they can command more pay because their leveraged work has more value.
You can go further up the hierarchy, to the people who organize or direct the technicians or the channels that distribute the products of their machines. Their work is further abstracted, skilled in its own way but not necessarily more so. But the amount of income their efforts command is greater still-- even more leveraged.
In areas where the use of the high-skill low-leverage work are largely optional-- say custom carpentry-- they often become unavailable because the sort of highly competent people who would excel at these tasks can make more money in a highly leveraged (but perhaps less skilled!) job writing boilerplate javascript to deliver advertising or whatever. In areas where the non-scalable work isn't optional, like medical doctors-- the prices tend to shoot through the sky in part due to the income an equivalent aptitude could command in a more leveraged position.
In between the two extremes we have workers that are just flat underpaid, and we rationalize the situation by imagining that they're less deserving.
As the article points out, many of these lowly paid jobs are highly skilled in their own way-- at least if done well. What they don't have, however, is a big initial training barrier to entry that limits the supply of capable people and puts market power for this labor onto the supply side.
Skill isn't a factor in wages except in so far as the required skill impacts the level of supply or demand in the supply/demand balance.
I think we often underestimate the capability of the average person because we can't know the average person and can't see first hand the depth of their ability and because we also so often put that average person in a situation that just doesn't exercise those latent abilities (or do, but do so in ways we don't respect due to cultural biases).
I guess you could make the case that their primary skill - reading the story that the people who promoted them wanted/needed to hear - is in fact what's being rewarded, but it has nothing to do with their applicability to high leverage work at all.
This kind of measuring jobs by efforts always ends up being won by an animal or machine. Even among humans, the guy digging ditches with his bare hands is putting in more work than the guy using a shovel.
It ends up being a stupid incentive structure, and is not a replacement for supply and demand in the labor market.
Physically the rock-pusher job is harder. Mentally the architect's. I'd say pay comes in based on demand. Do we have more brainy folks or brawny folks?
Because the work (1) takes particular skills, and (2) skills that are functionally gatekept so they are disproportionately found in people coming from a middle class (or, at minimum, proletarian intelligentsia) background.
It has work that is (compared to lots of more poorly paid jobs) hard to find people minimally qualified to do, but its not hard (in the sense of arduous) work, for the most part. Work being arduous doesn’t make it well-paid.
Which job was harder?