The Declining 'Need' For Doctors

Looking back on it, I don't think I expressed my point about technology and the quantity of teachers very well the other day. One way of getting at one I mean about this might be to ask yourself about the past 100 years' worth of growth in the number of doctors.

Think back to 1911. We had some doctors. They provided some health care. The quality of the care they offered wasn't very good, but there it was. Since that time, we've had a lot of economic growth, a lot of technological improvement, etc. One thing that we could have done during that time span was looked at the 1911 standard of health care and tried to hold that roughly constant over time. If we had done that, we would find that with every passing decade we "need" fewer and fewer doctors per capita to provide the same standard of care. Cheap automobiles would reduce the doctor-density needed to provide a 1911 level of coverage. Then over time we'd move to a system where the vast majority of doctors just sit in a big room and field calls from people with health questions. It'd be like the Butterball Turkey Hotline. They'd guesstimate what medicine you need and you'd get your prescription filled at the pharmacy. Over time, phone calls would get cheaper and then with the Internet you'd be able to get passive diagnosis, public health info, etc. The quality of health care provided by this system would be pretty deplorable, but that's the point. You're taking 1911 health care quality and asking how many doctors you "need" to achieve it. And the answer is "not very many."

Clearly, though, this isn't what's happened in the health care sector. Instead, better health care technology has led us to want more health care professionals. A lot more! So with education, too, the mere fact that we may "need" fewer teachers in the future doesn't tell us very much about what's actually going to happen.