you can make unpopular jobs popular by paying them appropriately
Discussion
No, you actually cannot because wages are tied to the incomes and living costs of the customers. The closer the work is to the end consumer, the stickier the wages.
That is why plumbers don't get paid an ever-increasing amount, due to their scarcity: there is an upper-limit to what the average person can pay for their efforts.
The reason rich people's jobs pay more is because the customers of their efforts are more liquid, due to the size of the customer (government, international firms, etc.) or the market that their customer is in (luxury goods, fancy hotels, etc.).
You can be closer or further away from the money faucet, depending upon who pays for your work.
That's why the woman with a ph.D. in gender studies working as a diversity officer for a big company makes €150k, but the plumber she has to wait 2 weeks for an appointment with, earns €50k.
There is no direct link between the usefulness or necessity of effort and the amount paid for that effort.
my favorite examples are nurses and kindergarten teachers
Never enough of them, and everyone's life is disrupted by the shortage, yet their wages are surprisingly sticky.
It's because their wages are paid for by municipalities. People who work for the German federal government, filling in spreadsheets with ideas for paving bike paths in Peru, get paid twice what they make because the federal government can afford to pay their people twice as much.
It is, what it is. Workers can also be cantillionaires.