You make more than your sister doing "less" work because knowledge and high level skills are a value multiplier. You may come up with a world changing idea that generates billions of dollars. No kindergarden teacher could achieve that. Pay matches accordingly.
Your second point is that there seems to be a lot of people with useless jobs and I couldn't agree more. We're RAPIDLY approaching the point where most people are employed to do basically nothing of value. How many people's jobs could be replaced by the mythical "script" written in a day by a good dev?
I'm glad to see us get to this point. People should learn and practice useful skills. So as not to cause a violent revolution, I think we do need some form of basic income though. That would also enable creatives to experiment and produce without economic pressure which I think is great. I also don't care if 99% of people mooch off this model as most people are just wasting time at work as it is anyway.
Capitalism sucks at valuing things that don't give immediate profit. Education is such a thing - it has extreme ROI... 20 years down the line. Which is too long a time and it gets valued less than small changes that will bring in a little bit of money next month.
And even ignoring that(for example, at private schools), the 'consumer' here is really the parent. The child isn't in a position to choose schools, so it's really about selling to the parent. I imagine it has to be hard to get a sense of any 20-year projected ROI if you can only indirectly measure teaching quality by what your child says and standardized test scores.
The tax base that funds the schools depends on the whims of capitalism.
I suspect that education would be a much higher priority and teachers would be paid much more if children could vote.
Except this argument doesn't seem to apply globally: I have a good friend over here in Europe who's got a PhD in computer science. He works as a researcher in a renouned university. His sister is not a kindergarden, but elementary school teacher.
She makes (slightly) more money than he does. Her work day starts at 8am and most of the time ends at 2pm. She's got around 10 weeks of vacation per year. She cannot legally get fired if she performs badly.
So in this country, my friends knowledge and high level skill levels certainly weren't a value multiplier when compared to his sister.
Granted, he might be able to get a higher paid job with his background, but that brings us back to the grandparent's original point: your education is not a good predictor for your salary.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/why-are-finlands-sc...
And then the kids grow up, and you are fucked. Do you think the first ever important thing those kids learn, for society, is when they become 20+ and one day they start learning compsci-simulated-quantum-biomolecular-teleportation-of-artificial-intelligence-nanoparticle-drug-dynamofeedback 101? (Yes, if it's not obvious, I just pulled that out of my...)
She gets less, cause the system doesn't care about if the world in totally destroyed 30 years down the road. (Actually that would be great. Opportunity for "growth" and profit.) It only cares about billions yesterday.
The example I see thrown around a lot is plumbing, or garbage collection. Presumably not very many people want to become plumbers, so they get paid accordingly.
I believe there may be a certain point in the development of society where there has to be a shift from the economic/capitalist model into a model based on human betterment or an effort directly focused on increased capability to sustain and improve our quality of living.
Capitalism worked to get us where we are, but I don't believe it will get us to where we want to be. It improved quality of life and was necessary to develop our current resources. Now we may be able to use those resources to directly model our lives and improve upon their quality.
Let's say we have a basic income. There will probably be less maids so people will have to spend more of their own time cleaning. Your office might have less janitors, part of your job might be to empty trash outside. Maids and janitors will still be around. Their roles would be diminished and they'll just get paid more.
We don't have a purely capitalistic model right now. Whatever we move toward won't be a "pure" anything, either.
But if I were to bail on the part of my job that I don't like, my end users will be pissed off. So I do all of it because I get paid okay.
It really doesn't seem fair, and when I think about the vast majority of the world population in other countries, it seems even less fair. I used to have a more conservative stance that if you want to get more, you just have to work harder, but now I've reversed my stance completely: I think it's mostly luck -- where you were born, who you know, what your social skills are, and if you just happen to be in the right place at the right time.
Many jobs seem like they exist solely for the sake of creating more jobs. We have managers of managers of managers. A lot of people don't put a lot of effort into their work (they spend their day browsing the internet), and the ones that do put in an honest effort don't seem to be rewarded for it. The hardest-working employees are rarely promoted into administrative positions. And the best way to increase one's salary is to job hop instead of remaining loyal to one company (http://www.forbes.com/sites/cameronkeng/2014/06/22/employees...).
I feel like many people have this ingrained notion that you're just "supposed to work" for so many hours a week, and no one is seriously pursuing the goal of creating leisure time (or at least work that's personally enjoyable). We have more than enough technological capability to provide basic survival needs to everyone on the planet, yet we're nowhere close to achieving that goal.
Again, I don't know why it's this way. But it is, and it just seems wrong to me.