So what will you do about it?
Pardon my utopian fantasy that follows, but my engineering approach is to imagine what the optimal solution looks like and then work out how to get there.
I find that the people I hang out with don't actually do what they do for money. They work for positive feedback from improving their corner of the world, fundamentally some kind of geeky 'flow' thing that comes from making things work better. As a software developer it's the most simplistic: to elegantly do more in fewer lines, and see it work. At a higher level there's some coolness that others enjoy using the software, and more ephemeral than that is if it can put some 0s in my ledger. For the others it's perhaps harder to quantify than LOC, but they say "I love my job". You may think I work for a salary, but in reality that just keeps my family off my back while I get on and do something I love.
Clearly there are jobs people do not love. You can't pay me enough to work on Windows nowadays, although I may decide to do so if it's an unavoidable part of a bigger problem that takes my interest. Garbage collection and rush work in hot, sweaty shops and kitchens seem like unpleasant examples (perhaps as bad as dealing with your boss), but I suspect most still take some pleasure in 'a job well done'. Not sure what solution works in this space, short of robotics.
The problem now is that we use the count of 'who gets to ask for what' as an end in itself, and use this to drive the allocation of resources. Changing the 0s in Larry and Sergey's ledgers won't affect their daily lives any more, and Bill's biggest problem is reallocating his 0s in the time he has left (barring life extension and nanotech armour). We scientists are perfectly happy working on new antibiotics, but the drug companies won't allocate us to that project because the accountants say the doctors won't prescribe capsules that cost £100 each for the 10 day course, and in the end I can't buy the petrol to get to work to do the job I love. Guess I work on more Viagra and Lipitor instead then.
So how can we keep the 'invisible hand' mechanism, but get off the hedonic treadmill of working for 'stuff' and allocate our resources more intelligently? Just askin'...