That's good, in fact. People should be compensated for the value they generate. Why should a fast food worker be compensated equivalently to a doctor or engineer? I do not want to live in a world where that could exist.
> We find evidence that industry and size adjusted CEO pay is negatively related to future shareholder wealth changes for periods up to five years after sorting on pay. For example, firms that pay their CEOs in the top ten percent of pay earn negative abnormal returns over the next five years of approximately -13%. The effect is stronger for CEOs who receive higher incentive pay relative to their peers. Our results are consistent with high-pay induced CEO overconfidence and investor overreaction towards firms with high paid CEOs.
https://www.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/CEOperformanc...
Employee compensation vs Output:
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-6/pdf/understanding-the-...
The CEO can tank a company (in fact they frequently do)
An engineer certainly has more power than average to sink a company (isn't half the star wars story pretty much this?)
Cleaning personnel does not
Of course you may not have had to study as hard, so your quality of life as a young person might have been better, but bartending is not secure income for life either.
Either way, the easiest way to look at it is, do parents tell their kids to aspire to become bartenders?
That sounds incredibly elitist and cringey. If I had a child earning six figures as a bartender I’d be very impressed, and even if they weren’t earning six figures but were enjoying life I’d be happy… And taking it from another perspective, I know people who’s parents would be disappointed their children are ‘lowly software engineers’ too. With that sort of attitude you can rarely win.
It is a rough rubric to gauge an average quality of life for a person who does a certain thing for a living, not that parents or even entire generations of parents are always right about the continued resilience of a given occupations’ quality of life.
At the end of the day, take home pay is one metric we can actually compare, because different people want different things.