This is probably skewed by my own personality and experience of the world, but the explanantion that comes to mind to me for why those practical skills are underprovided is:
doing practical things can be boring, and by definition is less intellectually stimulating than more abstract fields. Hence for the same amount of money the people who are good enough at maths say to be great engineers or physicists would far prefer to be physicists. Thus this makes sense as an equilibrium where you are paid a premium for doing boring less intellectual jobs. This clearly doesn't cash out for the most boring unintellectual jobs (manual labour, retail etc) presumably because there is an oversupply of people willing and able to do them but unwilling or unable to do other things.
So if somehow we end up in a society where almost everyone is very clever and educated but we haven't fully automated menial tasks, I expect cleaners and so forth to be among the highest paid people in the economy to compensate them for doing boring work when they could otherwise have a fun job as a mathematician.
This is probably skewed by my own personality and experience of the world, but the explanantion that comes to mind to me for why those practical skills are underprovided is:
doing practical things can be boring, and by definition is less intellectually stimulating than more abstract fields. Hence for the same amount of money the people who are good enough at maths say to be great engineers or physicists would far prefer to be physicists. Thus this makes sense as an equilibrium where you are paid a premium for doing boring less intellectual jobs. This clearly doesn't cash out for the most boring unintellectual jobs (manual labour, retail etc) presumably because there is an oversupply of people willing and able to do them but unwilling or unable to do other things.
So if somehow we end up in a society where almost everyone is very clever and educated but we haven't fully automated menial tasks, I expect cleaners and so forth to be among the highest paid people in the economy to compensate them for doing boring work when they could otherwise have a fun job as a mathematician.