A university education is still a prerequisite for entering some of the great guilds, such as medicine, law and academia, that provide secure and well-paying jobs. Over the 20th century these guilds did a wonderful job of raising barriers to entry—sometimes for good reasons (nobody wants to be operated on by a barber) and sometimes for self-interested ones. But these guilds are beginning to buckle. Newspapers are fighting a losing battle with the blogosphere. Universities are replacing tenure-track professors with non-tenured staff. Law firms are contracting out routine work such as “discovery” (digging up documents relevant to a lawsuit) to computerised-search specialists such as Blackstone Discovery. Even doctors are threatened, as patients find advice online and treatment in Walmart’s new health centres.I'll add later, when I have time.
Monday, September 05, 2011
The Economist Thinks Ahead
A very good article in The Economist:
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4 comments:
Online health advice ranges from decent to total quack garbage. Some people are smart enough to separate wheat from chaff, but many are not mentally up to the task.
Walmart represents a threat, but they are going for the easiest part of the field to commoditize - acute care visits for (basically) well patients. If you have any serious chronic condition or any acute condition much beyond a sore throat, you would literally be crazy to place your care in the hands of their minimally supervised nurse practitioners.
Another thought. If these "great guilds" go under, there will be far fewer paths for upward social mobility for people in the future. Why bring children into the world if they will be condemned to lives as poor peons. And I don't mean poor peon as you sometimes think yourself to be J, but really poor peons who are either permanently jobless or condemned to dangerous manual labor.
Great Guilds are monopolies regulated by the Government. The dream of every trade is to create a guild. In Israel, now architects have to spend a "stage" in an established studio for 2 years. For minimum pay.
Attorneys also have to make several years at minimal salary.
The worse situation is the medical specialists. Today 1500 "mitmachim" - doctors in specialization - resigned in mass (in Israel) because their month long strike was judged illegal by the Labour Court.
I heard an interview this morning: "I am 39 years old, married and father of children, yet I am working like a slave for minimal salary and my status in the hospital is like an assistant. I know of no profession where a man of my age and education and experience is still a "student".
He sounded very reasonable. I could add that I know another profession like that, it is university teaching. One cannot get tenure here before 40 - 45 years old. Only then starts to earn a rather good salary.
Yes, medicine requires many miserable and unremunerative years of training before independent practice can be assumed. In the U.S., Canada and even Europe, things get somewhat better after that point, although medicine is not nearly as lucrative as in the past. Israel, being the socialist Hell that it is, pays physicians very poorly after training. Now, the physicians are fed up and resigning. I'm glad they are standing up for themselves.
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