Yep. This is the big American secret the working class can't seem to discover.
The elite have busted the unions, but professional associations are stronger than ever. Doctors do it to avoid free trade, they are protectionist, and surprise! They get paid for it.
The primary purpose of professional associations is to protect the wealth of the members, and this is done by lobbying for protectionism.
Doctors are really the last strong professional association, though.
Lawyers have a cabal, but it's pretty weak. There's no cap on new lawyers or people attending law school. If you are dumb and/or have bad grades you can always attend a 4th tier law school. In contrast, there aren't 4th tier med schools. Someone who gets their MD at University of North Dakota is still going to be making $150K, worst case scenario. Lawyers on the other hand have lower average wages than one might think. http://www.bls.gov/oco/ocos053.htm#earnings It's just that a handful of certain lawyers, like trial lawyers, can make infinite money so others assume all types of lawyers are rich.
> Lawyers have a cabal, but it's pretty weak... you can always attend a 4th tier law school.
Getting a school accredited by the A.B.A. is expensive [1], and if the schools necessarily cost a lot of money to run then the students largely come out with big debts to pay off. The article says essentially that the U.S. is oversupplied with "expensive" lawyers and has a strong unmet demand for "reasonably priced" legal services.
Moreover, there are a lot of people talking about how law graduates in the US are underprepared for their work - there's a recognition that some traditional curricula don't provide enough practical know-how to function in the real-world without serious on-the-job training. Law is essentially a vocational degree, and there is evidence that the standards governing the accreditation of law schools (and so lawyers) aren't aligned with the needs of the country.
I'll grant that the gatekeepers of the medical profession may have a stronger hold on things, but there are decent arguments for liberalisation of the legal market.
yes exactly. The reason for the escalating healthcare and education costs have to do with the guilds these professions enforce to prevent newcomers from undercutting their wages.
If the U.S. were to abolish the AMA and the teacher's union, the medical and education costs in this country would plummet, and the coming medicare debt could be halved.
I'm especially skeptical about teachers; I don't know anybody who avoided becoming a teacher because the certifications or the jobs were too hard to get, but I know a number of people who didn't do it (or did it and quit) because the pay and social standing was too low compared with the difficulty of the work.
Teachers just negotiate for job stability rather than wage. For some reason, teachers are extremely risk averse and would rather be paid crappy, forever, no matter how bad they are.
The teachers associations ensure no teachers can ever be fired no matter how incompetent. Teachers get summers off and big pensions and so they lobby for these and other lifestyle perks.
Which doesn't say anything about the point I'm questioning, which is your claim that teachers are part of some closed guild that drives up wages by forcing out newcomers.
Note that the size of the boxes isn't really the relevant metric, but rather the color (which indicates the likelihood of someone in the profession being part of a household in the 1%). A darker color indicates a higher correlation between the profession and the income (ie, less likely that they simply married into wealth). Looking at the color, we see doctors, lawyers, and brokers, which is about what you'd expect.
If the data set was narrowed further to the top 0.1%, you would probably see the fee-based professions drop off and the high-end brokers dominate. There are only so many hours to bill or patients to serve in a day, while there is no limit to the size of a transaction from which a broker can skim a percentage.
