Occupations and Wages

After reviewing the wages of various occupations, I find that we will make little progress on addressing inequality by ending licensing requirements in law, because there really aren't that many lawyers.  There are far more workers employed in healthcare.

I went to the website of the Bureau of Labor Statistics and found this wage data for various occupations.  Then I put the data about the major job categories into a spreadsheet here.  The next to last column indicates the difference between the mean wage for that type of work, and the mean for all workers.  The last column multiplies this difference by the number of workers who have that type of employment.  An extraordinarily high number would indicate that a lot of inequality results from the fact that workers in this line of work make more than average.  An extraordinarily negative number indicates that there is a lot of inequality that results from workers in this field making less than average.  I put this last column into a chart that appears at the bottom of this post.

As the table indicates the largest factor in terms of wages comes from the high wage rate for managers, followed by the low rate for food service.  Next we have the low wage for office and administrative support, followed by high wages in healthcare.  The next two would be high wages in business and finance as well as in computers and math.

While it is definitely true that lawyers make much more than average and this is indeed a source of inequality, it is probably not much larger than the effect of the wages of teachers, which are slightly above average, since there are far more people in this profession.