He was probably talking about lifetime earnings and not yearly income. If you factor in the 11-19 years of additional training and lost income that doctors go through and make a plumber work the same amount of hours as a doctor, then I bet their lifetime earnings will be close.

Heres a post comparing doctors to UPS drivers, which shows what i'm talking about http://www.er-doctor.com/doctor_income.html

The US Bureau of Labor Statistics collects this data regularly. They are pretty interesting in that they expose many surprising things about relative wages. Annual mean wages (from http://www.bls.gov/oes/current/oes_nat.htm)

- Plumbers: $51,830

- General Practitioner: $177,330

- Chief Executives: $176,550 (added for entertainment value)

Medical specialists can make even more.

Most plumbers I've come into contact with were self-employed. They don't meet the description under "Plumber I" at all. Assuming 50K GBP in 2002[1] (I live in London), that's about 100K USD today.

There's no doubt that there's bigger upside in becoming a doctor, and the median doctor almost certainly earns more than the median plumber. But there's also a lot of downside; most doctors I know are stressed and overworked.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/money/2002/nov/03/wageslaves.caree...