This blows my mind every time I think about it. For context, I'm a software engineer who gravitated towards the field only thanks to my love for math in school. However, the thing I enjoy doing the most, that I'm good at and can make a career out of, is explaining math and related topics, such as programming. Showing others that it's not as scary and out of their reach to understand as they thought it was. Seeing how happy they are once they actually get it. I once even had a friend who did pharmacology in university and was forced to have calculus in one semester, she's smart af but isn't a fan of math, so I went to her place a few times so we can solve integrals and what not together, explaining things for her, and in the end she scored an A on the math exam. All of this is to say, I'd have way more fun and self fulfillment being a math teacher. Why didn't I become one? Because, surprisingly, at least where I'm from (eastern europe), their pay is slightly above minimum wage. Several times, in some cases a whole order of magnitude, lower than a capable engineer's pay. And there are way fewer good math teachers than there are acceptable engineers out there.
So, what gives? It's not like schools are filled to the brim with good math teachers who are actually capable of and passionate about teaching it and explaining it to their students in a way they'd genuinely understand it. This invalidates any argument of "sure there are fewer good math teachers but the demand is also smaller". On the contrary, the vast majority of math teachers in schools couldn't be bothered to explain math and do their job properly, much less show students why math is cool. Of course, I've experienced that myself in school. Another argument for why it shouldn't be the case that math teachers are so underpaid is that their subject is the early foundation for most of the actual highly paid STEM jobs of today.
So, given that schools are full of fake math techers who couldn't be bothered to do their jobs right (and in many cases simply cannot even if they tried), why are people like me not being incentivised to go teach math in schools? Why do I have to wait for engineering to make me financially successful before I can go become a math teacher and feel fulfilled? It's not like the difference is small either, to me it seems like picking between having the chance of becoming moderately rich and staying on a near-laughable salary my whole life. Is it like this in other parts of the world? Are there places where school teachers in general are paid well and respected? And more importantly, why? Is the answer simply "capitalism, baby"?