[mmarq]

Because their productivity hasn’t increased as much as that of people with higher incomes. The productivity of surgeons and software developers increased significantly, and so their incomes, while cleaners and factory workers are not much more productive than 60 years ago.

[SahAssar]

I would absolutely say that a cleaner or factory worker today is much more productive than 60 years ago.

[Ekaros]

How much more productive surgeons are? As in patients operated per working day or week? Outcomes surely have improved, but I'm wondering about speed in operation it self, not recovery.

[mmarq]

If outcomes have improved, productivity has increased by definition.

You don’t measure the productivity of people working in intellectual professions only by measuring units produced per day.

[Ekaros]

Actually I think you should when that work is not scalable. Surgeons can very well be measured by how many patients they operate on. And quality improvements are a thing, but how much more productive is there? 1,1x or 2x or 3x? Probably not magnitude more. So really their pay should only be that much more...

[mmarq]

If you can completely fix a hernia with 99% success at the first try without a hospital stay, you are significantly more productive than somebody that has a 50% success rate and that requires patients to stay in hospital for a week, even if you operate on the same number of patients.

[Dracophoenix]

Speed of operation or lumps of labor per second is not the only applicable metric and, outside of certain cases, it's not a very good one. Average patient health (arguably an ill-defined term) has many ways of being assessed:

* Fewer deaths from preventable diseases

* Breakthroughs in pharmaceutical research production

* New and improved medical devices to counter chronically debilitating sicknesses

* An increase in elective surgeries with fewer long-term effects

* Increased longevity across the globe