I've often thought that Physician Assistant might be a decent gig. Pay isn't stratospheric, but you can work anywhere in the country (a factor for two career families) and the training costs can't possibly be as extreme as a full physician.
There may be fewer "insider" investment opportunities available to physicians. Salary income for physicians is only part of their earning potential.
This is an astute comment. I live with a physician and have met lots of physicians who wish they'd been PAs instead, for reasons I enumerate here: http://jakeseliger.com/2012/10/20/why-you-should-become-a-nu.... Even the name is a misnomer, because PAs increasingly practice autonomously, so the "assistant" part of the job title is increasingly a misnomer or historical curiosity.
Why would you not want to be (practice as) an MD, but would be willing to consider being a PA, especially when the much higher cost of becoming an MD (time, effort, money) isn't even a factor for you (you already paid and won't get a refund)?
(I'm not challenging your choice; I'm hoping to learn something that might be useful to a younger relative of mine considering a medical career.)
Mainly because my specialty is collapsing and there are no jobs, so I would have to retrain in a different specialty. Of course, to be a PA I'd have to go through training as well, but the hours and stress would be a bit less. The stakes not as high.
I'm unlikely to do it though. The job market was only part of the reason I left. The field is so corrupt, political, and biased, the patients often so arrogant and defensive, I just hated the job.
Mostly manager positions at the top. That's how you know society is falling apart. When it starts becoming an old boys club with shared resources among guys that don't do anything useful.
Has there ever been a time in which managers weren't making more money than everyone else? By your logic, society has always been falling apart. Every generation creates its own old boys club.
I'm not sure making more is expected. In my other comment I mentioned e.g. sports teams or quant trading as examples where even average performing subordinates can make more than their managers.
But yes, the decoupling of manager pay (fast growing) from subordinate pay (slow growing) is frightening. I don't see any evidence that the world gets more value from the activity of management now than previously, and in fact I see tons of evidence, say even just Moral Mazes to start, that managers actively destroy value for society in many cases.
I'm not worried about them making more than their subordinates so much, it's not a job I'd want to do.
I've often wondered if we could improve the org charts though, so we don't have things like managers making technical decisions that should be left up to there subordinates.
And so they can't push down work that is part of management, like filling out timesheets.
In efficient markets, like sports teams, even average team members often make more than the manager (or coach). This also happens in some financial organizations that reward profit and loss on individual levels (it's very rare, and not as efficient as sports teams).
It's not particularly interesting to observe that outside of efficient businesses, managerial layers have a lot of room for rent seeking to ensure manager pay is higher than team contributor pay.
It's more interesting to try to understand why it persists, and what can be done to make employment more efficient in general. Or at least help people see which employers / fields are relatively more or less efficient, so you can decide if being paid way less than someone demonstrably reducing productivity (it happens with a lot of managers) is an ok tradeoff for you.
You can be sure it's a whole lot of Hansonian status signaling. For example, the well-documented resistance of project leaders to agree to be paid according to prediction markets about the expected project outcomes, delivery deadlines, etc. Even when experiments with such things led to better project outcomes, the managers then refused to agree to use the idea again or even to be part of, owing largely to the fact that their ability to manipulate things politically, and thus ensure higher pay regardless of the measured outcomes, was removed by the function of the prediction market. Without that angle to politically manipulate, they outright refused to work!
For example, the well-documented resistance of project leaders to agree to be paid according to prediction markets about the expected project outcomes
Is that a serious proposal? I've never heard of such an idea.
Prediction markets failed spectacularly to predict the outcome of the recent UK referendum despite an abundance of polling data and the only major uncertainty being statistical (not many people were changing their minds at the last moment, I guess). Most obviously because prediction markets tend to be quite shallow, and the types of people who use them bring their own mental baggage to the table. Why would a project leader be willing to submit to such a flaky and moreover gameable scheme?
You seem unfamiliar with the long and extremely formal research and experimental evidence supporting the use of prediction markets. It might be interesting to read a more detailed popular account [0] and then dive from there into some of the more specific discussions about what happened in the DARPA experiments.
> Prediction markets failed spectacularly to predict the outcome of the recent UK referendum despite an abundance of polling data and the only major uncertainty being statistical (not many people were changing their minds at the last moment, I guess).
Well, you are right that markets are not perfect and are susceptible to aggregated biases of the participants, for example just as how mispricing persists in the stock market.
I don't see how this offers a reason to feel that markets aren't the best that can be done, however. If you can propose a better mechanism by which to get info ahead of time, I (and millions of people) would be very interested.
> Most obviously because prediction markets tend to be quite shallow, and the types of people who use them bring their own mental baggage to the table. Why would a project leader be willing to submit to such a flaky and moreover gameable scheme?
This is bizarre and unsubstantiated. What are you talking about "mental baggage" -- it sounds like you have a personal grudge against market thinking and prefer to attack it, but without basis.
> Why would a project leader be willing to submit to such a flaky and moreover gameable scheme?
Actually, much of the research on prediction markets has focused on showing the extent to which they, mathematically, are not gameable [1]. It's bizarre that you feel the existing management mechanism, overt office politics, is somehow "less gameable" than holding people accountable for direct, specific, quantitative predictions. Even if markets were "gameable" you surely can't seriously be suggesting that they are somehow more gameable than overt office politics?
There are markets, and then there are prediction markets. The two are not quite the same thing.
There are a lot of assumptions in your argument, like the number of participants in a prediction market being meaningfully higher and meaningfully more interested than actual project stakeholders. You're also assuming that such people are less biased and more neutral than other people who have to suffer office politics. Everyone has mental baggage and taking part in a "market" doesn't change that.
The reason why players are more valuable than managers on a sports team isn't because the market is efficient. Players put butts in seats. Nobody goes to a game to see the manager, even if he's the guy running the show. People like big name stars. They sell tickets, so they are more valuable. Big name actors can make more than directors. Same reason. They sell tickets. Most us us don't work in a market that works remotely like that.
Real manufacturing output is far higher today than when NAFTA began. That giant sucking sound, is mostly productivity gains ending jobs that apparently no longer needed to exist.
What productivity gain could cause a drop from %18 to %14 in 5 years; that is disruptive. I've been an EE for 20 years, and don't recall any technologies that would cause that. The tech advancements to manufacturing are a slow progression.
Now didn't the BLS reclassify a bunch of service sector jobs as manufacturing, such as manufacturing burgers at McDonald's?
You're proposing that counting burger flipping at McDonald's (or the equivalent) explains an eight fold increase in dollar output per manufacturing worker since 1947, and a doubling since 1997?
I'm not aware of any reclassification by the BLS, such that making burgers is now considered manufacturing. The BLS very clearly still considers McDonald's employees to be service workers, not manufacturing jobs. You can see it in the monthly jobs reports. If all of those types of service workers were now considered manufacturing jobs, we'd have seen a massive boom in manufacturing job creation over time.
Did those jobs move to Canada and Mexico? On the other hand, it's my understanding that NAFTA also provides for cross-border portability for some occupations, notably engineers.
US manufacturing output is at an all-time high today. It hasn't decreased, it has significantly expanded since NAFTA was created. Productivity destroyed those jobs. The US is producing far more output, with far fewer manufacturing jobs. It's a replication of the productivity gains in farming previously. Workers have to move to other skill fields with growth, just as they did as farming's productivity soared.
> But even these anemic numbers mask serious mismeasurement of manufacturing output. More than 110 percent of all real manufacturing growth during this period was driven by a single sector, computers and electrical components (NAICS 334), whose output has been shown by numerous academic studies to be seriously overstated as a result of the very rapid rate of progress in computer processing speeds. Because this one sector (NAICS 334) accounted for all the output growth from 2000 to 2009, the other 18 major manufacturing industries were as a group producing less at the end of 2009 than they were in 2000.
It's particularly obvious that "computers and electrical components" do not account for the manufacturing output index climbing from 100 to 130+ between 2009 and 2016 and hitting a new historical high.
> It hasn't decreased, it has significantly expanded since NAFTA was created
"computers and electrical components" account for a good deal of the expansion in this time period.
Output is growing but it's lagging behind GDP growth. A heavy amount of the growth after the recession comes from the automobile sector. It's uncertain how sustainable that is.
It's just more complicated than trumpeting that manufacturing is at an all-time high. There are real concerns underneath those numbers.
It is a situation nothing at all like farming. Manufacturing output in current dollar terms is focusing on a few remaining successful sectors: autos, metals, some machinery and a half dozen, much smaller ones. Most of that growth is more about Japan's problems than our advantages.
Farming went the other way, it industrialized, and our wealth and government policy revolutionized it with Midwest grain and California's miracle in the desert.
Do you have some numbers to back this up? I don't recall almost everything in my house being manufactured in China when I was a child in the 70s. It appears to be the case now though.
I'd say the things around the house that say Made In China on them are largely things that simply didn't exist in the 70s. I'd like to find some kind of comparison to look into whether that intuition is correct, but whether it is or not, the numbers absolutely show US manufacturing is high and growing. It's manufacturing jobs that are disappearing, mostly due to automation.
What's being made in Asia that didn't exist before is super low cost disposable stuff that a lower-income family could buy, or that a middle-income family could throw in a guest room. I suspect that pattern exists all over -- I have some high-end first-world manufactured goods in my kitchen, but I also have some crappy junk that I use infrequently or on an almost disposable basis. Turn the clock back 40 years, and I would just have the high-end goods, without the pizza cutter or avocado masher or whatever.
This makes sense; furniture is big, heavy, and difficult to transport. Outsourcing is easiest with small, pricey items that can be safely packaged in rectangular boxes. Like phones.
Furniture, cars, houses etc. are cheapest when produced semi-locally, which is why even Japanese and Korean car manufacturers have assembly plants in the US and in Europe.
Responding because I'm getting downvotes... I (an American) was hired at one company because the management felt the country where the company was started (not in the USA) had sub-par engineering talent. Now I don't believe that statement to be true, in this specific case or in general, but wouldn't that make me a thief? Should I be locked in jail for taking a job people thought they owned?
No, mostly stolen by robots :-) Seriously though, most of the reduction in US manufacturing labor is due to guys like us: we automated the hell out of it.
NAFTA isn't what caused the changes in the labour market you lament. 2nd wave globalization, a shift to a knowledge economy and changes in social equality, especially with the rise of women in the workforce and the acceptance of child raising men all contributed to major changes in the labour force
Hardly. Ricardo still rules and virtually no one who says things like the above even understands gain from trade. Moreover, it turns out that NAFTA may have actually saved the US auto industry: http://www.nytimes.com/2016/03/30/business/economy/nafta-may....
At some point, the owners of capital are going to have to just start distributing a greater share of their profit as wages. Any other solution for stagnant wages is just making excuses for antisocial behavior.
Why wages? It seems backward to tie income to effort more so than the market wants to reward. How taxing it and distributing it as just transfer payments is making excuses for anti-social behaviour I have no idea. Do you want to see masses of people performing low or nil value tasks for forty hours a week? That's what unnecessarily tying income to jobs will lead to.
Um... the revolution of productivity that his happening in the workplace will likely enhance social behaviour and especially creative behaviour. The last revolution was about applying personal computing to the work environment - which did eliminate a lot of jobs, but created many more creative ones... and also brought about a much greater connectedness between human beings - first through email and then through social media. The next revolution is through robotics and one that will free many people from mundane tasks to much more creative ones... Bringing manufacturing back to the garage, and opening the opportuity for profit to many more people. In the same way, robotics/ai will also reduce traffic and provide a service where a person can have a physical presence virtually anywhere on the globe. We do not yet know the implications of the latest technological innovations - but history has definitely proven that each one only enhances not only our productivity (and "fun") but also our social connectedness.
but history has definitely proven that each one only enhances not only our productivity (and "fun") but also our social connectedness
I think history has shown that overlords like rent seeking until disenfranchised poor people revolt violently or nations fall into war, making all the normal societal conflicts irrelevant.
I am not sure social connectedness has improved. It may have improved in quantity, but not necessarily in quality. Check out how well people in cities know each other compared to decades ago. Of course, you need to compare apples to apples. Comparing disenfranchised situations yesterday to nice situations today is the same as comparing disenfranchised situations today to nice situations yesterday. Compare nice to nice.
The whole idea about robotics and AI freeing people from mundane tasks is not new. Automation throughout history has always had good and bad consequences, but it's also fairly certain that such industrial revolutions have always been accompanied by upheaval and uncertainty, as power players try to use new technologies for both good and bad.
The Victorian Internet about the invention of the telegraph is an excellent read for an example of how the more things change, the more they stay the same.
My argument is simply.... If you leave technical advancement alone and provide people freedom - not government oppression or try to kill innovation underneath of some set social theory... It works out, and it works out better in the long run. What would have happened if someone was regulating our speech right now in this forum? Would you stand for such oppression in the name of social correctness? It's going to work out... Just not in the old framework of the way you envision. Have a little faith.
I'm not sure what is this old framework I supposedly envision, and I'm not sure how the example of regulating speech in this forum relates to or helps to explain anything. We used to be talking about the effects of new technology by itself on society, nothing else. Just not sure where you're going with this if you want to start bringing up all that other stuff.
Well if communist theories are correct at a certain time the robots will be owned by the government (the people), and produce unlimited bounty. The idea being that people will only need to do minimal work. Now whether that works and we can figure out equitable distributions of that bounty remains to be seen (I'm pretty pessimistic it'll work, human greed will just get in the way).
Exactly right. If allowed, they will happily torch the commons and work on how to secure their own comforts while others suffer. The only socially responsible way to handle it is with enforced regulations. Yes, of course that presents it's own set of challenges and pitfalls, but there's just no other possibility.
Eventually we'll get to a point where it is just a circular hierarchy of managers managing other managers managing the first set of managers. Emails and meetings will fly around ceaselessly, while the machines churn away.
The graphic doesn't say anything about how prevalent these jobs are, just which ones are high paying and have high pay growth. It should not be surprising that medical professionals and managers are in these categories.
Trust me, we're far from your world of "managers managing managers all the way down". These jobs aren't growing on trees. Go look for an actual management job posting--you'll find that for every 1 management role most companies have, there are probably 100 non-manager roles open.
There's almost certainly already a micro-economy of exactly that sort of thing happening at companies like Facebook.
People sit around in offices, organizing daily stand ups about project planning, and assessing focus group reports for eye-motion-tracking data tied to Like buttons, and accelerometer metrics surrounding ringtone events.
A friend and I had a similar theory about convenience stores, since they seem to sprout up like weeds. If everyone just shopped at everyone's else's store, it would spread the wealth.
There may be fewer "insider" investment opportunities available to physicians. Salary income for physicians is only part of their earning potential.