Edit: What I mean to say is, the good lawyers make the same good money, the vast majority of lawyers do not.
It's also not even about being a "good" lawyer. It is completely determined by your law school and GPA. The big firms won't even look at your resume if you're not from a top 10 school.
He was good at that area of law, one which everyone encounters at least once in life. He did not do the work million-dollar lawyers do and he did make millions.
But generally yes. School first, then class rank.
That's not the case for starting lawyering, you have to: Go to law school, pass the bar, have a set of specialized skills than cleaning doesn't require.
This combination of skill and long (and costly...) processs is what keeps lawyer salaries higher.
What makes you think that? It's pretty trivial to cram for the coding and design questions, and be a mediocre engineer on a good career trajectory.
Law is a very status-conscious industry (even more than software) and so most of that oversupply of law graduates are not "in the club". They get paid relatively low wages and have to fight with each other for peanuts.
Some much smaller fraction of law graduates from top schools or who otherwise have the right connections get paid extremely high salaries because they are only competing with each other.
Or another way to look at this is that lawyers get paid based on their reputation. Firms with a high reputation only have the ability to hire so many new lawyers. Those positions are indeed highly sought after, because that's how you get paid well, by getting in with a firm that already has a reputation. You're going to have a hard time starting out on your own, building up a reputation. Hell, sometimes you need to have built enough of a reputation just to get a position with a firm that has a high reputation.
While people/companies are looking for the best person/firm they can afford to represent them... cleaners are still just cleaners.
You do get supply demand corrections over time though. If you know you'll be making minimum wage if you didn't go to a top law school a lot of people would stop doing so.
It’s basically a psychological refusal of our vulnerability in the world
Perhaps this isn't true? It's possible that salaries for lawyers are not going down, but that salaries for law graduates are going down (because not all law grads become lawyers).
Also, I thought salaries outside the major firms have cratered? (Or maybe were never all that high to begin with but law school has become crazy expensive and the lower ranked schools are churning out more and more people? IDK.)
My local bartender has a JD and passed the bar. He bartends because it pays better.
The difference is vast when it comes to the lawyers who I know who are making incredible amounts of money and those who are just... somewhat independent small business folks.
we live in a society that is heavily litigated because we have governments at all levels churning out laws and regulations to their benefit and those of their supporters.
There are some fields that exist to protect you from physical and financial harm and those will always exist and be desirable until we can eliminate the causes.
Watching Gantz, you wait for that moment at the end where something happens and realize you've wasted 10 hours of your life.
Accused of a crime? You may realize you've wasted your life in jail because you hired a bad lawyer.
I thought parent's argument is that you get thrown into jail because you didn't hire any lawyer. It's not that you got a bad lawyer, it's that you must hire one to defend yourself in the first place. Thus there is an always growing need for lawyers, bad or good.
If you want to learn how to solve any engineering problem or how to create an illustration you can choose from ample amount of tutorials that are free or very cheap and teach specifics. If that's not enough, you can ask veterans for guidance and most will happily help you out and even give you specific detailed answers to your problems. People also would be hired based on their performance and no one will ask for diploma if you show performance.
On the other hand, if you ask a lawyer they will be extremely vague and would never solve your problem or guide yo without a pay even if the solution is something practical like "Go to the Home Office, find the whatever manager and ask for the hr-103/B form".
They also would limit practicing through memberships to professional organisations, limiting the practice only to formally trained lawyers.
David Graeber made this observation, and suggested some sort of class tribalism.
Btw, to use cleaning as a specific example, taxation of domestic services is broken in almost every (western?) country and skews how people spend their time and money. Most professionals would happily trade an hour of work for an hour of cleaning services, however, by the time you put income tax (and VAT in my case) on top, your hours need to be about 2.5x times as valuable as your counterparty.