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"The average doctor in the U.S. makes $350,000 a year. Why?"

The Washington Post’s Andrew Van Dam on the average US doctors' salaries:

The average U.S. physician earns $350,000 a year. Top doctors pull in 10 times that.

I will write more about this later but for now I will just note how frustrating it is to read an article that has a premise and conclusion that I completely agree with (America doesn’t have enough doctors so the ones that it does have are compensated way above average) backed up by mishandled and misreported data (first the article doesn’t say whether the “average” is mean or median — it is the median, which is actually good — then doesn’t explicitly mention that the median in question is of the adjusted gross income at the household level, not of individual compensation: the median total individual income is $265,000).

At least the article linked to the NBER paper with all the data, which in turn completely validated my recent quip about economisits. Frustrating throughout, especially if you try reading the comments.

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