>>11036374here’s the real answer: academics flood their own market and the oversupply drives down their pay. at the same time, medical degrees are supply limited (unlike PhDs, which meme tier universities mint an oversupply of) so doctors are “rare”. most people who go into medicine do it for the money whereas academics do it out of love for the field or because they think they’re only good at one thing to get a prestigious degree.
here’s an example: physics postdocs get paid about a fifth of what a doctor their same age would make, and the reason people become postdocs (which are highly competitive) is because they don’t want to “sell out” and be a corporate “data “”””“scientist”“”””. the doctors OTOH could never make more money by moving to another field, so they make sure that their MD degrees stay in short supply to insulate their profession from getting flooded with an oversupply that would lower salaries.
lawyers have it the worst: they can’t make more money changing fields yet JD degrees have gotten overflooded, so many young JDs can’t find jobs anywhere
