Doctors have the AMA, which provides accreditation and artificially limits supply. This provides some of the value that unionization provides, although it technically isn't.

Yeah but doctors are a unique entity. There's little need for doctors to do collective bargaining because there's barely anybody who could take their job, so they already have a lot of bargaining power.

If doctors didn't require a medical license, alleviating the need for 4 years of medical school + residency, suddenly there would be a glut of competition and doctors would surely need to unionize.

Conversely, if software development required an arduous, expensive, hyper-restrictive license, there would be no need for software developers to unionize either

>...because there's barely anybody who could take their job

That's the point: relative pay matters, and an important + scarce job _deserves_ higher pay than others.

>If doctors didn't require a medical license, alleviating the need for 4 years of medical school + residency...

These aren't arbitrary boundaries - this is difficult work with significant downside risk if you fuck up. Not anyone can be a doctor, and we need doctors, so those who succeed deserve higher pay. Virtually anyone can be a Fry Cook or a Walmart Greeter.

Uncomfortable fact: society needs doctors and engineers (software or otherwise) many times more than we need fast food workers.

Personally, I really do think medical licenses are too restrictive. I think a lot of very talented people who could have made great doctors end up pursuing other careers, because they weren't willing to commit to a pre-med undergrad + 4 years med school + residency while they were 18, which the typical age that people have to make that decision.

I also think the medical field suffers because the only people who become doctors were people who have been on the track for becoming a doctor their whole life. An engineering firm might have artists and philosophers and tradesmen who are passionate about engineering and self-taught, bringing very unique perspectives to various problems. These same people have enough talent, motivation and humility that they probably would make great doctors too.

And I know for a fact that doctors would benefit from e.g. a systems engineering or fluid dynamics background to better understand the medicines they're prescribing and be more equipped to prescribe the right one in the right doses, or maybe a math/statistics background to understand unintuitive numerical data such as "X diagnostic test is 99% accurate.... [fine print] because it reports 100% of cases as negative and only 1% of cases are ever positive".

My imagination can only go so far with examples, and I know there are very good reasons for the tight restrictions, but I strongly believe the restrictions are too tight.

Doctors are not any more essential than nurses like the piston isn't any more essential than the crankshaft. You need the whole team, working in concert, and there is no other way about it.

With all due respect, your take is naive: just because you need a team doesn't mean some members aren't more essential than others.

You can, in theory, have an Oncologist handle your cancer without a nurse; you can't have it the other way around. That makes the former more essential.

Unless you can afford your own doctor, I'm afraid you ate being naive. The reality of care for the lot of us that we depend on the system as a whole working, not individual professionals. If the nurses strike, hospitals shutter. By the way, as an oncology researcher, doctors are vastly overrated anyway. Their main contribution is signing documents. It is my officious goal to make them obsolete.

Makes me think about Milton Friedman's talk about airline pilots and the American Medical Association, rebranded as a union, and his question of

    Who are the strongest unions in the United States. Which unions in the United States are strongest in the sense of having been most successful in raising the wage rates, the earnings of their members?

https://youtu.be/_L69YcXsdEg?t=478

Honest question: is nuance lost on HN? Is everything now just polarized viewpoint vs. outlier anecdote, over and over again? Do we only care about first-order ideas/effects and think that a once-off event discredits institutions that are centuries old?

They're not outliers, they're counterexamples and fairly strong ones at that. Police unions and teachers unions, on the other hand, are both great examples of how unions can be a detriment to society.