I don't think anyone could argue that lawyering and banking are unique skills, but they're [SPAM] highly compensated.
I'll bite.
Good, effective, knowledgeable lawyers and bankers are unique and can create substantial economic value. It takes a lot of skill, experience, dedication, and interpersonal skills to turn one of those professions into a successful, long-term career, especially at the international level. Just like with any knowledge-based industry, people at the forefront have to be innovators and effective leaders, and those skills certainly aren't abundant when you've already whittled down the field to folks who:
A) Have (a) relevant degree(s) and knowledge (CAUTION: credentials =/= knowledge!)
B) Are socially adept, particularly in environments filled with hostile personalities
C) Are willing to work 90+ hour weeks for the rest of their lives
D) Like what they do
As with anything in life, you get what you pay for. Firms take a gamble that they won't choose a lemon and have to pay well to attract real talent. There are a lot of lousy bankers and lawyers out there masquerading as good ones, which colours the perception of the professions.
Now, you won't hear me saying that other professions--like scientific researchers, roboticists, or educators-- who are paid less are somehow less noble. We just live with the reality that markets can only effectively compensate what they value and aren't myopic enough to fail to observe/ foresee. (And that's assuming some benevolent government dictator hasn't made a dog's breakfast of market dynamics already, which further muddies market foresight.)
The reasons bankers and lawyers are paid well relative to their value creation are liquidity and measurability. Their output is money, which has immediately and universally recognizable value and doesn't need to be converted through a subjective utility function. The second you enter the realm of heterogeneous subjective valuations, uncertainty, myopia, and different intertemporal discounting factors, prices won't reflect the intrinsic value of the activity. Try rallying the same consensus around the discovery of an exoplanet or a new dinosaur fossil. Humans are terrible...with a capital T!... at valuing the future and placing estimates on improbable events.
So, to the point of the thread, hopefully our children will choose a set of career paths (deliberately plural) that they at least enjoy, because most of us will be underpaid relative to the intrinsic value of our work at almost anything we do. At the heart of this, IMO, is building a diverse skill set that blends personally gratifying and technical abilities.
