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There has, from time to time, been some discussion concerning doctor salaries. I don't personally care all that much about this. They're highly-trained professionals in an in-demand field, and doctor salaries probably aren't the main driver of overall healthcare costs.
Nevertheless, there's often some debate over what the numbers actually look like. I was just linked to this tweet in one of my econ link aggregators. (Yay, built-in browser translation!)
Their claim is that 84% of American physicians are in the top 10% of incomes, and 26% of American physicians are in the top 1%. Their paper makes comparisons to other countries. They also broke it down into primary care vs. specialists.
So, at least this is one snapshot view of the actual distribution of doctor salaries, which I hadn't really seen before in these discussions. Assuming, of course, that their methodology is sound, which I'm not qualified to assess.
Doctors are one of the only high status, high income, high volume jobs.
This is actually a great way to think about this wider issue. There are high status (meaning respect as a profession) and high volume jobs - like nurses and architects, but the pay is usually decent or below. There are high pay and marginally higher volume jobs - like some computer programmers, oil rig workers, successful salespeople - but they tend to have medium or lower social status (both prestige and occupational respect). And there are high status, high(ish) pay jobs (senior judge, Hollywood A/B lister, senator), but they’re very low volume. How many astronauts are there? (Apparently the most ‘prestigious’ profession). 50?
There are a million doctors in America. Doctors have very high social status / occupational prestige. Doctors have excellent job security and high pay. This unique combination exists for no other profession.
Sure, there are people who make more than doctors, like investment bankers, quant traders, senior executives at major corporations, but they are arguably widely reviled and in any case there aren’t many of them. And sure, there are the astronauts and noble prize winning scientists, but they almost all get paid less than doctors (according to Reddit the recent lunar astronauts probably make $150k a year). There are more ‘fun’ jobs like artists and creatives, but again, the trade off is that you’ll be poor unless you’re 99.9th percentile. There are schoolteachers, who also have relatively high social respect and good job security, but they make far less than doctors unless they’re in a top-10 paying nationwide school district (in which case the local doctors make much more too) and they’re still lower status than being a doctor.
The question is ‘are all three levers necessary here’? STEM adjuncts (who are often very smart) work for shitty pay and there are still tens of thousands more PhDs produced every year. In countries where doctors are paid much less (including relative to average salaries), medical school is still very competitive - suggesting that status (or more charitably healing the sick) is enough of a motivation, you don’t need to add ‘getting (moderately) rich’. Lastly, there are so many doctors relative to other very high pay professions that they cannot all or mostly or even to a large extent find other jobs - and since nowhere pays doctors more than America, they can’t emigrate either.
This suggests doctor pay can be reduced in the United States without major risks.
Software development is higher status than nursing. Unless you're asking the bottom of society.
Was. The good times for status are over, I think.
Where's it going, then?
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