…as answered on Quora….
Many distasteful jobs are well paid. Do you want to be a proctologist? I do not. And yet people who probe around in others’ anuses for medical purposes are not kept artificially poor.
Many, many high-paying jobs are jobs our society cannot function without. And not a few are distasteful to many, if not most. One reason many smart people do not go into politics, despite this profession’s long history of high spoils rates, is because it is disgusting work. Tedious. Morally ugly. Dehumanizing. And most people say politics is absolutely essential to modern society.
I would rather drive a garbage truck or sling cowshit in a dairy farm than serve in the Oval Office.
Or probe around in the above-mentioned orifices.
And let us say, arguendo, that more and more people found garbage collection and sewerage repair just too disgusting to hire themselves out for. If these jobs’ products remain demanded by people, the customers would indeed pay higher prices — and with a tight supply and higher demand, we can expect wages to rise in those fields.
It is worth noting that many dirty jobs actually pay pretty well. See Mike Rowe’s once-popular show, Dirty Jobs. Consider “the trades.”
To answer the original question in the affirmative is to take a conspiratorial view of wages. Those who believe such things should study economics, learn about “marginal productivity,” and put away silly hunches and prejudices.
But let us return to the first phrase: “The big lie of capitalism is that everyone can be rich. . . .” If by this one means “equally rich” (which probably is what is meant) I have to say: I’ve never heard anyone assert that this is what a market economy offers us. Equality of wealth is not possible — unless you flip that around: equality of dire poverty is possible.
And in societies geared to be extremely anti-capitalist — that is, in socialist societies — caste divisions and great disparities of wealth become quite large. Just think of Venezuela’s richest woman, the former president’s daughter, and contrast her with the masses of that beleaguered-yet-resource-rich country. Now starving, they no longer line up for food, they line up at the border, trying to exit the country.
Equality is not a function of nature. No society but the simplest and poorest sports material equality. Even in hunter-gatherer tribes there tends to be some startling inequalities. Markets reward performance on merit through that amazing filter, supply and demand. It is not equality that markets produce, but quality in general. And, as others have stated, we are a lot wealthier now than we used to be. There has been awesome material progress.
It is a pity that a progress in wisdom has not been nearly as marked. But, to some extent this is to be expected: education has been monopolized in public schooling as well as in limited-accreditation higher ed, to an amazing degree for well over a century — monopolized in the non-capitalist sector of society.
twv
Wirkman Comment 
A sardonic reflection on the Big Lie of Capitalism.
I was reading Michael Levitt’s twitter timeline. He comments about two professors who “believe COVID resistance may come from young infecting old with common colds”. This is not a new idea, but these may be the perfect days to use it against Capitalism, which is what I am about to do.
It seems that one of the functions of the young, particularly babies, is to “naturally vaccinate”, so to speak, the older humans, with weaker immunity. Microbes infect the young, whom often have powerful immune systems, and as they defeat diseases, they inoculate, by means of normal human behavior (hugs, kisses, laughter, playing, telling stories, monkeying around), the older people around them, who thus become better equipped to survive the actual killer microbes roaming in the wild. This is not a perfect system, as no one likes to become sick, but it seems to work good enough for the last few hundreds of thousands of years.
Adult lives are actually being saved by babies. Adults lifespans have expanded, and made better, as babies and children have become healthier and happier. All of this in spite of evil, greedy, anti-egalitarian Capitalism.
So far, am I wrong in any of my deductions?
Now, because of how Capitalism works, many people are now childless and grandchild-less and nephew-less and family-less. Which means they are not going to be saved. This is the feared “inequality of outcome”.
But isn’t life more important than any salary? Isn’t good health more important than any form of commerce?
The Greedy Capitalists, inhumane and devoid of all compassion, need to make everyone equally vulnerable to disease, and equally incapable of getting the cure in any way that does not involve buying it from them. The Capitalists will sell the cure at different prices depending on who is buying, because they like to discriminate and make it difficult for the poor to buy the cure and survive. Capitalists love to exterminate their customer base, just as Genghis Khan loved to kill those whom he defeated and conquered.
Capitalist Pigs resent the fact that Mother Nature makes it difficult for them to win money. They must use psychological manipulation techniques to force everyone to believe they cannot get what they need except by being enslaved into consumerism. This is the Big Lie of Free Market Capitalism: that Mother Nature is trying to kill you and Capitalism will save you.
Everything in Politics since the time of Hegel up to now depends on the Big Lie I have just exposed.
Why is this reflection sardonic? Because it scorns many ideologues: the anticapitalists, the capitalists, the ecologists, the pessimists, the scientists and all kinds of conspiratologists.
Also, I do not believe that Capitalism exists anywhere but in the rotten brains of Marxists. Who in her right mind would care one bit about inexistent devils?