The most disturbing trend I noticed over the past couple of years is that of white-collar workers who are doing jobs which damage society in some way (even by their own accounts) and yet who try to justify their higher-than-average salaries by citing the emotional turmoil and/or guilt that they have to endure as part of their job.

Salaries used to be purely based on how much value an individual contributed to the economy. Now they're often based on some strange mix of turmoil, guilt, extortion, manipulation...

The economy doesn't care how much you suffer! It only cares about how much value you add... Yet somehow this fundamental law of economics is not applied to salaries within many large corporations. These corporations make no attempts to try to reward employees based on value-creation... For example, companies like Facebook pay employees different salaries for the exact same position depending on which country they live in. If salary was based on value creation, this would not be possible. Clearly, there is something terribly wrong.