Everyone is taught that doctors save lives.

However many others in society save lives that are not so lavishly praised or financially rewarded.

For example in New Zealand median pay for a Road Design Engineer is about $100k NZD compared to a GP (doctor) getting $240k. Plus the doctor gets paid a massive overpayment of social status.

Over a 40-year career, an average NZ GP will save 5 to 10 lives. The Road Design Engineer saves 40 to 120 lives. Road engineers in NZ prevent roughly 10x more serious injuries than they do deaths so it isn't just death stats.

Our hypothetical engineer should be paid > 10x more than the doctor on raw stats.

It gets harder when we start looking at quality of life versus raw lifetime numbers. You then need to consider the value of say entertainment (a good movie) versus the hypothtical lives saved by spending the budget elsewhere.

A game designer might be valued highly by a gamer mum, and negatively by their children and gaming widowed dad.