Could we have a more appropriate follow up to yesterday’s piece on poverty than this piece from today’s NY Time titled Gilded Paychecks
Lure of Great Wealth Affects Career Choices
By LOUIS UCHITELLE Published: November 27, 2006
A decade into the practice of medicine, still striving to become “a well regarded physician-scientist,” Robert H. Glassman concluded that he was not making enough money. So he answered an ad in the New England Journal of Medicine from a business consulting firm hiring doctors.
Okay, this bad boy takes up four pages online and six when you paste it into a document so I’ll be forced to do some serious condensing.
That said, most of this article boils down to so much ‘blah, blah, blah’ about how the financial sector is offering SOME professionals the proverbial ‘bigger, better deal’.
First let us examine our initial statement: “Robert H. Glassman concluded that he was not making enough money.” A statement based on this evidence:
Dr. Glassman hopes to enter this circle someday. At 35, he was making $150,000 in 1996 (about $190,000 in today’s dollars) as a hematology-oncology specialist. That’s when, recently married and with virtually no savings, he made the switch that brought him to management consulting.
It cost a ton of money to go to medical school and Mr. Glassman went to Harvard, an educational institution that is not ‘cheap’ by any standard. What will (or at least should) blow the readers mind is the fact that this poor fellow was ‘broke’ while earning $150,000 a year!
Briefly mentioned was the fact that his new bride made even more than this...which prompted his decision to jump from ‘practical’ medicine to becoming an ‘investment advisor’.
Soooo...over $300,000 a year wasn’t ‘enough’?
Mama Mia!
Also briefly mentioned is the ‘circle’ Mr. Glassman hopes to become a part of. What ‘circle might that be? Have a gander...
As some have grown enormously rich, they are turning to philanthropy in a competition that is well beyond the means of their less wealthy peers. “The ones with $100 million are setting the standard for their own circles, but no longer for me,” said Robert Frank, a Cornell University economist who described the early stages of the phenomenon in a 1995 book, “The Winner-Take-All Society,” which he co-authored.
Fighting AIDS and poverty in Africa are favorite causes, and so is financing education, particularly at one’s alma mater.
"It is astonishing how many gifts of $100 million have been made in the last year," said Inge Reichenbach, vice president for development at Yale University, which like other schools tracks the net worth of its alumni and assiduously pursues the richest among them.
Okay, let’s be ‘astonished’...even if it is the Prez’s alma mater.
Once again good citizen I’m going to ask you to use our critical reasoning skills and to think for a moment, where is this money coming from?
There are two factors to consider here, wages and prices.
Think, think, think, where is this money coming from?
Is it the money fairy?
No, that’s not it.
How about the concept that YOU’RE being OVERCHARGED (for the crap you buy) and UNDERPAID for the work you do!
I mean face it good citizen, ‘average’ people are spending 120% of their pay in a futile attempt to make ends meet.
Is there a more poignant kick in the groin than to see these people giving that money away to their ‘favorite’ causes as part of their ‘legacy’?
Because this is exactly what these hundreds of millions of dollars represents, raises you didn’t get and lower prices you never saw!
Isn’t logic beautiful?
Unfortunately, failure to exercise such logic is what’s driving our society right off a cliff.
I’m going to dribble back to an issue raised in yesterday’s piece, the issue where employers are not compelled to pay a living wage...nor are they constrained to charge fair prices.
Well, good citizen, I don’t know about you but I’ve had enough.
Add my voice to the many diarists here who are calling for a return to economic sanity. Fair wages and prices are the cornerstone of a healthy society.
Hitting the ‘reset’ button won’t work, we need change, real change.
Thanks for letting me inside your head,
Gegner