> Those salaries should be at least 3 times higher.
Why? What about supply and demand? Do you mean salaries shouldn't be determined by supply and demand, or demand "should" be higher?
If demand for these skills should be higher, but isn't, that is an opportunity for entrepreneurs. Your or anyone else, if correct, could make a killing using these skills at low prices (salaries). The more people who do that, the more the prices of their skills rise.
Supply and demand do not determine value. Supply and demand do determine price. The equating of price and value is a lazy attempt to find an objective interpersonal measure of value by saying "what is" is equivalent to "what should be," since determining "what is" is typically easier than forming a consensus on "what should be."
Demand for a cure to hair loss is high, and billions more will be spent on it, than will be on a cure for malaria or other diseases where the sufferers can ill afford the cost.
Market forces are better than previous systems at allocating resources, but they aren't infallible.
As someone has pointed out, theres a difference between price and value.
What about supply and demand? Do you mean salaries shouldn't be determined by supply and demand, or demand "should" be higher?
Time-behavior + value-creation vs. value-capture.
Market demand for science R&D is pretty much nil. Basic research requires some kind of altruistic/passive funding (government, universities).
Market demand for the technologies that come out of basic research, decades later, is nearly infinite.
No one is going to pay, on the market, $150,000 per year for a biologist to analyze some weird protein. But when that work results in a cure for several common cancers, 20 years later, I'd say it's paid itself off by several orders of magnitude.
Why? What about supply and demand? Do you mean salaries shouldn't be determined by supply and demand, or demand "should" be higher?
If demand for these skills should be higher, but isn't, that is an opportunity for entrepreneurs. Your or anyone else, if correct, could make a killing using these skills at low prices (salaries). The more people who do that, the more the prices of their skills rise.