The poster above you; they're the one who made an implicit claim about the value of software developers' work. You're welcome to disagree. Do you think everyone is paid fairly?

Punishing people for believing in their work is called "exploitation".

Yes.

Personally, I think they're all underpaid. But I don't set their wages. Society does that by agreeing a level of tax people are happy with, and then spending that money on public employee's wages. Collectively society has agreed to pay those people as little as possible. That's the important thing in any wage negotiation - you have to understand where the money is coming from, because ultimately that's who gets to decide the maximum limit of one side of the bargaining process.

So in the case of teachers you have an individual teacher's pay being an agreement between that person and how much Joe Random wants to pay in tax. Teachers are always going to lose out on that one.

The answer is either to educate the public about the value of public wealth (eg why higher taxes are actually better for society in many ways), or to privatise the education system. Neither works well on a national level.

That's not a solution because the people in power materially gain by feigning ignorance.

> Teachers are always going to lose out on that one.

How can you openly admit that the incentives don't work and still defend them?

> Punishing people for believing in their work is called "exploitation".

What is the relevance of this?

Being smart and how much you make aren't related. There are researchers working at universities in Europe being paid miserable salaries and yet making incredible discoveries (like medical ones) and these are incredibly smart people.

Meanwhile there are people with only a few neurons connecting raking in millions on "only fans".

And, no, the later aren't smarter than the former.

What else could anyone want?

Heck, today i saw Sepp Hochreiter sitting in the tram on his way to uni. He could do anything in the world, yet he chooses to live the european academic life.

Think about it, who's funding these researchers you're celebrating?

I'd argue being smart is linked to money. You don't need to spend all your time exploiting the markets if you're smart, but just enough to build a resource pool that can enable your endeavors. People work with what they got - in your latter example, they're selling their body. If academics were functionally smart, then it's a simple task for them to be able to exploit and win against a capitalist market.

  If you're so smart, why aren't you rich?

  If you're so smart, why aren't you happy?

I find it deeply troubling that so many people conflate “being smart” with “min-maxing labor and earning”. It reflects the strange belief that the best people are the best capitalists.

I take issue with the thesis that money is crystallized virtue where more of one is more of the other.

I suppose it is what people need to believe, however. Good luck with that, I guess?

And they're veeeery vocal other people trying to get something for nothing.

There are smart people burdened with moral compass, which forces them to "do the right thing" which might be pursuing their passion or contributing to society.

Then there are smart people who are happen to exploit social structures to get ahead.

There are also plenty of not particularly smart people who figure out how to get ahead exploiting social structures.

Doesn't make the smart people who actually have a consciousness to answer to less smart than the rest

This is not about smartness, but about willingness for ass-kissing and ability of to play political games. This is not associated with intelligence, but with dark triad traits. Quite some smart people look through all this, but are incapable of changing the situation.