[whoisburbansky]

Is it better to have an undersupply of doctors leading to overworked doctors and generally worse medical outcomes or to have an oversupply, with some of the excess going on to do, e.g. research or administration? Exactly matching supply and demand is practically impossible, so which side is it safer to err on?

[wcunning]

It's obviously better to have a, say, 1% oversupply than a 1% undersupply, but that's not an interesting question to answer, really. The better question would be: is it better to have a 1% undersupply than a 15% oversupply? (Or some other larger and less obvious mismatch) It would be clearly bad to paperclip-optimize doctors -- everyone must go through all 10 years of post-secondary education to be a doctor and then after they have done so, we will be pick the best 3% of them to be practicing doctors while telling everyone else to find another career is incredibly wasteful, as is anything significantly in that vein.

[nradov]

It's rather meaningless to talk about oversupply or undersupply of doctors. Demand for healthcare services is effectively infinite. The problem is that we burn up most healthcare resources on treating preventable chronic diseases, and on futile end-of-life care.

Rather than on supplying more doctors we would probably get better results for society as a whole with more dieticians, personal trainers, and substance abuse counselors.

[mywittyname]

An important consideration is that those doctors could have been something else.

If you buy into the notion that intelligence follows a normal distribution, and that people below some threshold are fundamentally locked out of professions, then it becomes important how society allocates that top x% of intelligent people, because they are in short supply.

A society that underproduces physicists in favor of doctors might find their economy is unable to grow rapidly enough to pay for the hospitals those doctors need to operate in. One that overproduces amazing musicians might find that their cultural influence helps to attract smart people from other countries.

We see this issue in America too. Where hedge funds are paying extremely intelligent people tens of millions of dollars annually to program computers that essentially play games in the stock market with the programs written by other hedge funds. That isn't exactly the kind of behavior that will lead to the technological improvements our society will need to continue to grow.

[caf]

Where hedge funds are paying extremely intelligent people tens of millions of dollars annually to program computers that essentially play games in the stock market with the programs written by other hedge funds.

This seems overly reductionist. A case can be made that these games are overall working to optimise the allocation of resources, which itself contributes to growth.

[mywittyname]

Yeah, these people might be ensuring more optimal prices for corn, and maybe that's a good thing. But in doing that, they aren't doing something else which may be more important for society.

My point was that very smart people are a finite resource. And misallocating them can have devastating effects on a society.

[captainoats]

How each person assigns value to different professions is entirely subjective. Almost every industry has its own bell curve, the market determines how tall/shifted each is.