fluid times call for fluid measures
Interesting article about how some professions are slipping in appeal, and others are gaining.
Paging Virginia Postrel: dynamic economy in aisle four!
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/01/06/fashio…
…As of 2006, nearly 60 percent of doctors polled by the American College of Physician Executives said they had considered getting out of medicine because of low morale…
law and medicine – the most elite of the traditional professions – have always been demanding … also unquestionably prestigious…
in the days when a successful career was built on a number of tacitly recognized pillars…doctors and lawyers were perched atop them all.
Now, those pillars have started to wobble.
“The older professions are great, they’re wonderful,” said Richard Florida, the author of “The Rise of the Creative Class: And How It’s Transforming Work, Leisure, Community and Everyday Life” … “But they’ve lost their allure, their status. And it isn’t about money.”…
In a culture that prizes risk and outsize reward – where professional heroes are college dropouts with billion-dollar Web sites – some doctors and lawyers feel they have slipped a notch in social status, drifting toward the safe-and-staid realm of dentists and accountants. It’s not just because the professions have changed, but also because the standards of what makes a prestigious career have changed.
This decline, Mr. Florida argued, is rooted in a broader shift in definitions of success, essentially, a realignment of the pillars. Especially among young people, professional status is now inextricably linked to ideas of flexibility and creativity, concepts alien to seemingly everyone but art students even a generation ago.
… Forty-four percent of lawyers recently surveyed by the American Bar Association said they would not recommend the profession to a young person…
The number of applicants to medical school, meanwhile, has dipped to 42,000 from 46,000 in 1997…
Students are focusing now on starring in their own creations, their own start-up businesses…
“There’s a sexiness to starting something cool,” she said. “Now we have people trying to start a Facebook or a MySpace. You might be working like a maniac, but it’s going to pay off in status. You’re going to be famous, providing something people are going to know and use all over the world.”…
There have been several advances in cultural technology over the last 5 thousand years or so that are so trivial and obvious (in retrospect) that we take them for granted: property, rule of law, trust at a distance, uniform measures, join stock companies, pooled risk, employee / employer relationships, punctuality and other aspects of a time-based culture, tolerance of failure, etc.
Some of these are still not uniformly spread around (try to do business in, say, Pakistan, or the Philippines, and tell me how easy that is)…and the folks who haven’t adopted these memes and technologies pay for it with fewer choices and lower standards of living.
Changing what the culture rewards with status, from the risk averse, to risk takers, is also a great thing, IMO.
January 6th, 2008 at 12:55 pm
Interesting. The book ‘Manliness’ makes the claim that risk taking behaviors (promiscuity excluded)was specifically targeted in PCism mostly because females are more risk averse than males. So risk taking has to be punished, just to keep everything fair and all. Nice to see the pendulum swinging back in so many ways.
January 6th, 2008 at 2:10 pm
1997 I think was the peak in med school admissions anyway, so of course there is a “recent dip”… no shortage of applicants by any means (I think still 1 applicant for every 2 spots available nationwide, and of course your local ratios will vary accordingly)
I would kind of want my doctor to be conservative and risk-averse.
I think both medicine and law have had decades of practicioners “not recommending this profession to a young person”. Why? Because it’s a lot of work, and a lot more work than you ever think it could be going into it.
Much like starting your own business.
January 6th, 2008 at 3:22 pm
GB – I think there’s a difference between risk-taking where the downside is physical harm and risk-taking where the downside is “work like a slave for nothing for several years”, “have to move back in with your parents”, or, worst case, “have to get a traditional job after all”.
I’m also pretty sure that another reason doctors and lawyers are losing prestige is that “have to work so many hours you never see your kids” is now a status loser, when it used to be a status winner. More young men, in particular, envision a future of family time in the evening (some time in the distant future, of course).