The short list of jobs with high and rising pay
blogs.wsj.com
blogs.wsj.com
There may be fewer "insider" investment opportunities available to physicians. Salary income for physicians is only part of their earning potential.
Among policy wonks, there's a meme going round about how healthcare jobs are the new manufacturing jobs. See here for one example: http://www.slate.com/blogs/moneybox/2012/01/25/decline_of_ma....
(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.)
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.
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'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.
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!
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?
> 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 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.
Go be on a team with a shitty manager, I bet you'll soon find out that they are VERY useful...
1) US manufacturing real output, 1985-2015:
http://i.imgur.com/QMRdpJO.png
2) Total construction spending on manufacturing:
http://i.imgur.com/pXKLGdy.png
3) Real manufacturing output per US worker, 1947-2011:
http://i.imgur.com/8SSHwiJ.jpg
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.
Now didn't the BLS reclassify a bunch of service sector jobs as manufacturing, such as manufacturing burgers at McDonald's?
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.
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.
http://www2.itif.org/2015-myth-american-manufacturing-renais...
"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.
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.
And lots of stuff that used to be made here is now made in China and other parts of Asia, like furniture and clothing and phones.
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.
http://www.cnbc.com/2014/10/26/once-creaky-sales-turn-sturdy...
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.
( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_automotive_assembly_pl... )
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.
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.
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.
[0] < http://slatestarcodex.com/2016/05/30/ascended-economy/ >
Edit: it struck me that in your scenario, it might be better referred to as the "ass-ended economy" har har har