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Apologies for the digression, but I feel compelled to point out there are legitimate economic reasons why certain jobs are valued over others that are in their totality more important to the maintenance of civilization. It is, at least, not purely aesthetic and cultural.
Imagine a society with two professions: farming and weaving. Of the two, farming is obviously the more important -- it doesn't matter how nice your clothes are if you starve to death. And, for the sake of argument, let's say that weaving is the harder of the two, requiring far more education/training/practice.
Farming is both more useful and easier. So everyone should be a farmer, right? Clearly not. If you have no farmers, adding one is massively valuable: he directly saves many lives. But if you already have many farmers, adding another one just increases variety slightly, or reduces produce prices. If you have no weavers, adding a weaver is pretty valuable. Less so than the first farmer, certainly, but the most important uses for cloth -- bandages, maybe, or protection from the elements in harsher climates -- are important, and obviously that's where the products of your only weaver will go.
So you want some of each. How many? Not an easy question, but here's an algorithm that should work: given X farmers and Y weavers, would X-1 farmers and Y+1 weavers be more valuable? Or the reverse? Swap one worker in the indicated direction and then repeat until neither change improves total utility. The average value of a profession decreases monotonically with worker count (if you cut one farmer, the rest will adjust such that only the least valuable farming work goes undone), so this simple algorithm should always find the optimal arrangement.
This is all just a long winded way to say that jobs (and all other goods) are valued at the marginal return rather than the average, and that's a good thing. The point of a wage is to incentivize workers to adopt a certain profession, and you want to allocate workers to where they can produce the most value given the current state of the market. If nail factory workers aren't paid well, that's because we already have enough nail factory workers. You don't compare the total value of nails to the total value of [some other better paid profession], you compare the marginal value produced by an additional worker in each field, because that's the number that indicates where the marginal worker should go.
If that poor wage results in a large exodus from the profession, fewer nails will get made and more and more important uses for nails will go unfulfilled... such that it becomes worthwhile to pay nail factory workers more. Everyone -- factory owners, consumers, and workers -- just need to follow their individual incentives and the result naturally maximizes total utility.
As for prestige: to some extent I think you're right that it's about self-actualization. Teachers and musicians and journalists are much higher status than their wage predicts, and petroleum engineers much lower. But these cases are interesting because they diverge from the baseline; wage is the baseline. After you've stripped away all the cultural/philosophical cruft, you'd still expect to see the observed phenomenon.
A valiant and praxeological critique of sociological Marxism!
At the risk of opening a huge can of political economy, and bearing in mind that I agree with Mises a lot more than the average person, there is still legitimate criticism to be had of how will and whim can make work that is not necessary (in the economic calculation sense) look immensely valuable.
Indeed, economic analysis is sometimes blind to what is a far more valuable if difficult to measure commodity: power.
Why are NTY journalists who are literally on less than subsistence pay higher on the totem pole than your average chemical industry executive? Power. They can ruin that executive and make him kill himself if they round up enough of their colleagues. You can't buy that. Billionaires have tried and failed.
Now this isn't to say that wage isn't a primary factor in one's status or immensely correlated with power and prestige (we do live in a capitalist society to some degree), but it isn't the only factor, and other factors can supersede it given circumstance.
Economics is like nature, you can override it for a long time if you have the will to do so, albeit never forever.
In what universe are NYT journalists higher on the totem pole than a chemical industry executive? And even if they were, they don't have some magically independent power to conjure life-screwing facts out of thin air.
Kavanaugh was an example of life-ruining facts literally being conjured out of thin air. They didn't succeed, but that was due to notable external factors.
Could you elaborate with actual concrete examples how mainstream media did it? My memory is hazy, but if I recall correctly, even some of the more liberal magazines like NYT specifically mentioned that they couldn't corroborate certain allegations against Kavanaugh with other people they questioned.
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Maybe this time one is successfully disciplining their journalists.
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This is like saying that cop is more powerful than CEO, because cop can arrest the CEO not the other way around.
NYT can indeed "ruin" even otherwise rich and powerful people, but the decision to "ruin" someone is not made in any democratic way (by "rounding up" friends) and is made far above any "subsistence pay" regular journalist.
A charismatic colonel is more powerful than a CEO. It's all contextual, of course. My point is that status is not reducible to monetary value. That doesn't mean you can't make an economic analysis of it, just that it's a lot harder than looking at the numbers you do have.
Yes, it is all contextual. "Charismatic" colonels are few, most officers are cogs in the machine (just like most CEO's). Analogically, you can say that popular and well connected investigative reporter is rather powerful, but how many of these are in NYT of today?
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