How about this title? Have to keep you interested, but also a little off balance. Exactly what do I mean by "Rationalization"? Seems like it is something that is wrong with our kids. The term was coined back at the turn of the last century, not 2000, but 1900. That shows how old I am. When I talk about the turn of the century, I am talking about the transition out of the 1800's. How does Henry Ford figure into this? I think you know that Henry Ford was the one who really put the assembly line concept on the map, but he had some help. A man named Fredrick Taylor was a little ahead of old Henry on the concept. He is the one who coined the term "Rationalization" in the context of dividing all the jobs necessary to build a car into small specialized jobs that did not require the person to be all that skilled or smart. He "Rationalized" the jobs along the assembly line so that each person just did a very small part and could thus get very good and fast at it. It also meant that the workers did not have to be highly skilled since they only had to do one simple job over and over. As you might have expected they could now hire people who were poorly educated and in some cases could not even speak English to do these very simple repetitive jobs on the assembly line. Henry Ford picked up on this concept and you know the story from there on. This was back in about 1906. After this short story, you must be wondering why I have spun this little yarn? As you might expect, I have my reasons, so here goes.
I was checking on the Internet, how much doctors make according to their specific specialty. As you might have expected the specialist make as much as twice that of doctors who do general medicine. I have some numbers that I will show later. Notice in the case of Henry Ford and Fredrick Taylor they made "specialist" out of the workers on the assembly line and reduced the skill required and also the cost and in the bargain, the assembly line workers got very good at their small job and thus were much more efficient. The net result was that Henry thought that he could make good cars so cheap that everyone could afford one in their garages. He was right. Most Americans are to this day very proud of what Henry and Fredrick accomplished for the quality of life for everyone here in America. Now my point here is that I thought that the medical profession was doing this same thing. I assumed they were "Rationalizing" the jobs within the medical care community just like Ford and Taylor did over a 100 years ago, but I was very wrong. What they have done is to "pervert" the whole concept. They have actually found a way to charge "more" for "less and less". Is that the American way or what? It must be some kind of out growth from our educational community that believes that education should progress until the individual, "knows more and more about less and less until in the limit, he know everything about nothing". It is more like this than you might think. In the end, the individual must be worth more by virtue of what he has learned vs actually what he does. To my way of thinking, you get paid for what you "do" not who you are or how much you know. Why would you pay a person more for mowing your lawn if he had a PhD than if he was a high school drop out? Hey, that seems to be what we are doing. We have been doing it with teachers and see what has happened. We are doing it with doctors and see what has happened. I know a doctor who just works on hands. That is all he does. No person ever died as a result of a carpal tunnel operation, but he is paid as much as a heart surgeon. He can do the procedure in his office with very low overhead. Is this logical? The "fix" must be in or I would have expected that old fashion free competition would have corrected this situation by now. One reason that it has not is the perverted systems used by our medical schools. After the person has spent half of their lives in school and have degrees as regular doctors, they then specialize in hand surgery. When they start their specialty, they can forget 99% of what they learned in the past 25 years. Oh! wait. They still need to be paid back for all this 99% of education that they did not need and is of no value in treating your hand. It is this a screw job or what? We do almost the same thing with our school teachers. They start out teaching 2nd grade and over time take all kinds of extra classes that have zero impact on teaching 2nd grade, but are now "worth more". Figure that one out. I thought that we got paid for what we do, so if after 30 years, you are still teaching a 2nd grade class of 25 kids, why do I have to pay you more? What we need is to get Henry Ford and Fredrick Taylor back so they can put "Rationalization" back into teaching and medicine. Isn't it interesting that both of these groups are killing the economy of the USA and they are both doing it in exactly the same way. When will we all wake up?
Wait, maybe its me who doesn't understand what is going on. The doctors and the teachers are "rationalizing" that since they have gone to school all this time they are "worth more" rather than how us unwashed "rationalize" that you get paid for what you do and any extra skill or education not needed for the job is your problem. A little side fact. Did you know that at the University of Wisconsin Madison the greatest number of Masters Degrees are issued for "Social Worker". You want to know why? 99% of these people have undergraduate degrees in worthless things like Sociology, Psychology, Political Science and Communications, but by getting a Masters degree in Social Work that has no prerequisite expect that you have to have a heart beat and an undergraduate degree of some kind can now qualify for good paying jobs where the pay is based on your degree rather than what you do. It is just like the teachers and doctors. I just thought you ought to know this. It is clear to me that we our universities are training people on how to game the system and who are they gaming? The government or us tax payers. Is this a great country or what? Our kids are being educated to be gamers of the tax payers with the tax payers own money. What a system. I rest my case and hope that someone like Henry Ford or Fredrick Taylor appears to save us from ourselves, but I don't think it is Obama.
PS, The average annual compensation for a hand surgeon in the west is $692,374 while the average for family practice is just $197,655. Check the numbers at
cejkasearch.com
