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Notes -
Somewhat related but I've become convinced that the way the doctor profession works is a drain on society.
A practicing doctor is a somewhat important profession that requires a reasonable amount of intelligence to do competently, but they also have horribly low productivity compared to many other highly paid professions, seeing as the doctor only ever helps as many people as they physically can see. Combine this with fantastically high base compensation and a borderline ironclad employment security until the grave and we have a societal problem where medicine effectively becomes a form of sinecure for the intelligent.
There are more productive professions within the realm of medicine like researchers and med-tech engineers (and there is some overlap with doctors here) but they generally aren't meaningfully better compensated than regular practicing doctors and often get paid less.
I'm not saying these people shouldn't be well compensated or that we shouldn't have doctors but the current incentives leads to a situation where a good portion of the most intelligent are drained away from the economy to do low productivity work at a very high cost.
This could all be solved with an increased amount of doctors. The intelligent and driven will go on to more productive work (whether in the realm of medicine or elsewhere) and society gets access to more doctors for a more reasonable cost (just how much lower depends on the country).
There's also the pressure to publish and research while also being a doctor that downgrades the focus the profession has on actual patient care.
My friends jumping through the residency hoops rn are kind of frustrated about it; they have to explain their "side hustle" almost instead of being able to say "I just want to be a doctor" to get "good" residency spots.
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