As to your question of wages, when it comes to effort/skill/knowledge, it doesn't have to be either/or.

I agree that it doesn't have to be either or. However, you still have to pick about 50% of the population to earn under median wage. There's no either or there, you MUST pick about 50%.

In these types of conversations ("XXX doesn't earn anywhere near as much as they should", "Teachers should be paid way more", etc), I have asked this question very often for decades now. And so far, not a single response has ever identified which jobs should be paid under median. Not once. Not ever.

Once on the old motley fool boards, probably at least 20 years ago, during a long and somewhat heated debate, I mentioned that the median wage was something like $36.5k. Immediately there was a strong response along the lines of "that's ridiculous, that's not a real living wage, nobody should earn so little, nobody should earn under $50k". Seriously, that was the response, and tons of people agreed with it. I suppose they had no clue what "median" means, or maybe they just didn't think about what they were saying.