A couple of nights ago I was watching the NBC nightly news. They had two stories, one right after the other, that were rather instructive. The first was about the growing shortage of primary care doctors in this country and the rush of medical students to train to become medical specialists. This report noted that average pay of primary care docs is $190,000 a year. Average pay for radiologists is $490,000 a year. And the top paying specialists, spinal surgeons, make $611,000 a year on average.
That sounded like pretty good money, even for the “bottom end” of medical practitioners. That is, until the next story on this same news broadcast. It was about Goldman Sachs. It seems the average compensation this year for folks working there was reported to be better than $900,000.
Of course, there never was, never will be, and probably never should be, a direct link between pay and how much good one class of worker provides to society. As an habitual lottery ticket buyer who would be more than happy to soak up a fortune for no work at all, I naturally support this reality. And yet…
While a class of society that improves the workings of society should not necessary be more greatly compensated than others, a class of society that almost wrecked that society does not seem like a group that should be waxing richer and richer while most everyone else is slowly sinking into harder times, or has already sunk there.
The Wall Street crowd that puffed up a bubble so it could get egregiously rich, was then bailed out by the government (us), seems to be getting even richer today puffing up a new bubble that seems related hardly at all to anything resembling a real, broad-based economic recovery.
I remember an incident many years ago. I was a kid playing with other kids in a neighborhood park. We were so intent on our game we didn’t notice another kid, a stranger to the neighborhood, sneak up and throw a stink bomb into our midst.
When we managed to recover our wits we saw this nasty kid and tried to chase him down. But he was already in the back seat of a car, his parent’s car maybe, and driving away. And he was laughing at his helpless pursuers.
That’s how I feel about recent reports about compensation at Goldman Sachs and other big name financial firms. I feel like these people are laughing at the likes of me. And that they know there is nothing, absolutely nothing, anybody can do that will keep them from profiting, one way or another, no matter what else is happening in the rest of society.