T
he amount of money you make is a pretty good approximation of how valuable society as a whole, considered in terms of anonymous individuals, thinks you are. People want money, and do not want to be parted with it -- that they have parted with any of it and given it to you indicates that they find you (or, what's the same in an anonymous market, the goods and/or services you provide) more valuable than the money they had, and loved dearly. If you are "playing the game" correctly, you should be consistently testing the waters to see if people will part with even more money on your behalf, just to see how valuable they really think you are. In general, if you're not making much money, it's because either lots of people could do what you do, or people don't care particularly much for what you're doing. And conversely, if not many people can do it, and there's demand, you're probably going to make an okay living at minimum. Grifting and exploitation of course happen, but this system a good first approximation of "societal value". Whether this is a good or bad state of affairs, well...
I applied to work at a timber framing workshop today, and was shocked by how little the workers there can expect to make. These are highly skilled laborers engaging in a beautiful traditional craft that typically gets marketed to folks with real money, and these craftsmen are apparently making less than I was at the end of three years on-the-job training in brain-dead simple commercial carpentry. Maybe this particular workshop is an outlier, but some cursory googling on timber framing makes it seem like its an outlier in the positive direction; that these men are making above average wages for their trade.
I suppose there's no accounting for taste. The only way I can make sense of these numbers is that demand is extremely low for timber framing, and the only way the prices can stay competitive is by keeping workers on menial-labor-style wages. You can't force people to buy things, and it would seem that timber framed buildings are, to my extreme disappointment, out of style; purchased only by those with niche interests who have a few extra bucks to throw around. Very clearly, it's not a thriving market.
Used to be, back in the day, that everything was hard to do. In order to get anything at all done, you had to hire highly skilled workers; and since you were hiring expensive labor anyway, you might as well get them to make something beautiful and timeless while you were at it (having a bone-deep sense of the sacredness of buildings and the desire to please God probably didn't hurt either). Putting in the extra mile, relative to just how expensive the whole affair was, just seemed worth it.
But modern technology has done it again! It is cheap cheap cheap to just get something standing that won't immediately fall down again. And the difference in cost now between a kinda functional, hideously mediocre building, and a truly functional, beautiful building is staggering. This machine kills craftsmen, I'm afraid. At every step, we thought we were getting what we wanted; look at us now.