Source: I'm an economist.
Even members of the Nobel family have come out and said the prize is bullshit.
The more people are willing and able to do a job, the less is the perceived marked value, especially if they are not organized in unions to assert their interests.
Now from what I know unions are generally frowned upon in the US for some reason or another (perhaps because of their obsession with capitalist ideology), and reports say that large corporations are actively oppressing the formation of unions.
So what is left is simply trying to avoid work and perhaps hoping that some companies will come around and provide reasonable working conditions and pay or to start businesses themselves, while trying to survive the bullying tactics of said companies.
It is interesting, that in free-market economics, you get many of the same effects as in nature and evolution. There will always be parasites.
The problem today, are all the people so convinced of the perfection of free-market economics, that they will insist that even the parasites somehow serves a purpose.
The more power you have over others, the more money you make. That's the real "free market" definition of value.
There's a reason climate damage and other critically important side-effects of market dysfunction are dismissed as ignorable "externalities". They have little or no immediate political effect and no independent political agency. Therefore in market terms their value is either zero or negative.
The physical reality is that the game board is on fire and unless something changes the entire game will be over soon.
What we have is some form of (heavily financialized) crony statism, where a bunch of well connected monopolies milk consumers shamelessly (health "care", higher education, etc).
There is no getting around the fact supply and demand = price. If society wants to change the price, society needs to work on moving the supply and demand curves. So what is left is providing people with the information on the market, such as publicizing pay rates (Colorado has made a good start here), and then providing people with the means to get an education so they can provide the type of labor that the market is willing to pay more for.
Another option is unions, although that is more difficult when the global supply of labor is so high and people around the world are willing to work for 10x less. In this case, tariffs are an option, but then you get into politics and there are other consequences to consider.
Economics does have a fair amount of fortune telling. I believe the entire field of technical analysis is bunk and really is "fortune telling" but I think that economists have a lot of value to add outside of fortune telling BS.