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Culture War Roundup for the week of March 16, 2026

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I can’t just google “average salaries”. If we’ve learned anything the last few years data lies. I just know anecdotally every Doctor I’ve ever met over 50 is quite wealthy. I’d have to do fundamentally research to figure out what’s going on.

Believe my best friends dad does goes cardiovascular. They have ten homes and 25m in brokerage accounts. My gut says mid-career ops exists where someone no longer gets classified as “salary” Doctor and earnings magnify.

The AMA is powerful. They’ve restricted supply of Doctors. It doesn’t make sense that real per capita medical spending more than 2x between 1990-2025 and the AMA didn’t get a cut of that. “Everyone else” in medicine got rich except Doctors is what you are saying.

This is conspiratorial thinking. Physicians pay for services which you can see public approximations of that show salaries, they then use these numbers in negotiations. They are off by a little, not millions of dollars.

Additionally something is horrifically off with your sample, ten homes and 25 million in brokerage accounts is a lot of fucking money. That's a lot of non-physician business, luck with investments, or fraud.

Also, you have to listen when I say that the 80s and 90s aren't what is happening now.

Tons of doctors in their 40s and 50s are still paying off loans. A saw a physician publishing data to other physicians showing that the average 40-50 year old physician is worth less than a million dollars.

Things change. Don't be like the woke people who refuse to acknowledge that you can turn of the affirmative action funnel because women started outnumbering men higher education in the 80s.

I've repeated a million times here that the AMA is not doing what people think it is doing, and none of what they are saying is how the physician supply line works. If you have doubts watch a Sheriff of Sodium video. Also that's not what the AMA is. People act like it's some mandatory guild instead of a much reviled in the field organization that lobbies for its own interests which are abstruse and not related to physician interests.

It’s possible all ownership options have gotten cut. Civil Engineers have low salaries. But then they can get into being a contractor, some specialized business where being the smart guys helps, design build, development, etc where there is more money than being salaried.

The administrative state has definitely sucked up a lot of the rising costs in medicine.