When you read this post at the Progressive Policy Institute expressing their take on the tech boom:
Suppose you were counselling your college-age child about what fields to consider. Where would you tell them to start?
The short answer: Tech and health. Just look at the numbers: Since 2007, when the current tech boom started, employment in computer and mathematical occupations–including software developers and network administrators–has grown by more than 900,000 jobs. Employment in healthcare occupations–including physicians, nurses, skilled medical technicians, and support occupations–has risen by almost 1.9 million jobs. Everything else: Zilch.
I think there are several things you should keep in mind:
- The total number of jobs in the U. S. is about 125 million.
- The total number of jobs in the tech sector is about 6 million. Nobody really knows how many tech jobs there are outside the tech sector.
- Wages in the tech sector have been flat for well over a decade.
- The total number of jobs in the healthcare sector is about 20 million. Most of those jobs are relatively low wage jobs—as in many sectors the wage distribution is extremely skewed towards the top 5% of the workers in the sector.
- Between 50% and 70% of the revenue in the healthcare sector comes from government in one way or another. If you think that the number of jobs and the median pay for jobs in the sector can both increase indefinitely, please explain to me the dynamics of how that will happen.
“Suppose you were counselling your college-age child about what fields to consider. Where would you tell them to start?”
If I had a college age….-oh, that’s right, I do – and they had a commercial orientation I’d tell them marketing/leadership/entrepreneurship. We have a growth problem.
Most of the prescriptions I read look like they came straight out of central planning at the Politburo.
Most of the job listings I see are in tech and healthcare. Tech wages may be flat, but they still pay higher than anything else besides specialized advanced degrees (there are a lot of engineers in my area because of NASA and the various commercial and government space programs).
You might find this interesting.
http://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamainternalmedicine/article-abstract/2565684
Thanks, steve. The study confirms your remarks about machine diagnosis but it doesn’t contradict my claims which are that a) there were better programs in the past—they got shot down by the FDA; and b) FDA hostility to machine diagnosis has increased the costs of gaining approval and caused the pool of investment available for machine diagnosis to dry up.
Also, I’m a little curious about the “vignettes” they talk about. What do they consist of? Clinical results only? What happens when the human physicians are presented with data only?
It also doesn’t address the question of which is better? A correct diagnosis one-third of the time or no diagnosis at all? That’s the situation where there just are no doctors.