No mention of doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, architects, librarians, actuarians, dentists, pharmacists .. in that article.
These all professionalized in the late 19th/early 20th century, to great benefit of practitioners in these fields, in terms of remuneration or job security or even both. If those get to benefit from rent seeking, it is not surprising that others would seek the same advantage.
To be fair, as someone with a fair number of doctor friends, the other side of the equation is equally important.
In the US, we have a fair number of "must be this well educated in the field to work" legal requirements in these fields. In terms of, if someone walked in off the street, tried to X, and screwed it up, then there would be fairly serious consequences of the screw up.
We expect excellence (or at least competency), which means education, which means substantial upfront monetary investment in oneself to prepare for profession X.
Certainly there's a lot of archaic & unmodernized baggage in these fields, but the basic bargain of "if you put up your own money (or borrow) to successfully train yourself in these fields, then we will provide some stability on the demand side to bound your risk."
And before it gets tossed out, no, the amount of education to become a practicing software engineer in the US is nothing like any of the above fields in terms of financial risk and calendar time learning.
A goal of professionalization was to restrict entry in the profession, to ensure job security. This happened across the board in a wide variety of fields. Mostly college educated work. Later, labor movements were successful in pushing licensing requirements for trade workers as well.
Your argument reads a little like an after the fact rationalization. Yes, we need good doctors, but that's not the reason why SelfStudy Steve can't practice wart removal or write medical marijuana prescriptions without an MD. Physicians have been very succesful in defending the status quo. One particular sleight of hands is perpetuating the myth that the financial commitment when entering medschool is akin to taking a risk. It is decidedly not because the payoff is virtually guaranteed. I'm not necessarily disagreeing, don't get me wrong, that we need skilled medical practitioners, but the profession is the text-book example of rent-seeking, yet somehow it's unseemly to say this out loud.
Anyways, I don't want to make it seem like doctors don't deserve their pay. That's a different question But I think it is perfectly OK for barbers to pursue job security, and do so through means that have a proven track record.
A small unrelated comment, and I forget where I picked this up, but it tickles my funny bone and just wanted to share.
Paradoxically, the professions that are least likely to be able to guarantee a successful outcome, are paid the most. For example, engineers can reasonably guarantee the bridge will stay upright. Once the work is completed, the client too can easily evaluate by having their donkey walk over it first. A librarian can usually say if she'll find an original primary source within a collection, and the patron can verify with a certain amount of confidence when taking delivery that he's handed the real deal.
However, a lawyer will most likely hem and haw if you ask if he can win your case. If you end up losing, it'll be because of a biased jury, or unfavourable public opinion, perhaps the judge was drunk. Grandma died from that infection? The doctor will say it was old age, or the cancer was really strong, or "god works in mysterious ways". And when you are an insurer, did your actuarian really miscalcute the fire risk in that new township, or do you take him at his word and was it really just all a minuscule coincidence that the place burned down?
The bolder the bluff, the higher the reward. Because you didn't go to law school, how would you know if the lawyer didn't miss this&that amendment to this&that ordinance? You didn't go to med school, so how would you know that the doctor did not wing it that particular night, paying more attention to his fantasy football game than meemaw? And are you confident enough in your high school maths to verify the calculations that yielded that bad actuarial table?
Anybody can recognize a bad from a good haircut though.
> One particular sleight of hands is perpetuating the myth that the financial commitment when entering medschool is akin to taking a risk. It is decidedly not because the payoff is virtually guaranteed.
That's my argument. That the payoff is virtually guaranteed precisely because of the supply controls via licensing.
A Canadian friend gave me a kind of counterexample: Canada decided it was at risk of running out of X (some profession, specialty doctor I think), so they pulled levers to ensure a bunch of students trained in that. Those students graduate, oversupply, salaries crater, too bad for them.
It's not only the monetary cost as a risk, but the opportunity cost of entering a profession that requires extended training.
These are people's lives. Maybe they should be paid less, but it seems pretty shitty to say "We need you to do this really important job really well, so train really hard and then..." (you have some security)|(cross your fingers and hope the labor market hasn't changed while you were in a decade of school)?
Funny bone indeed. It also seems that, as a consumer, these same professions are the hardest to get good information about. If someone serves a burger with a bland sauce they'll get 20 Yelp reviews over the weekend. On the other hand, there's no way for you to tell if your lawyer is going to charge $500/hr to to google stuff that you googled a long time ago.
No mention of doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, architects, librarians, actuarians, dentists, pharmacists .. in that article.
These all professionalized in the late 19th/early 20th century, to great benefit of practitioners in these fields, in terms of remuneration or job security or even both. If those get to benefit from rent seeking, it is not surprising that others would seek the same advantage.