醫(yī)生才是社會地位最高的人？

醫(yī)生才是社會地位最高的人？

接受了高等教育的社會精英們，更愿意從事金融、咨詢行業(yè)的工作，可當人類危機產(chǎn)生的時候，受到保護的可能是醫(yī)生和科學家。

測試中可能遇到的詞匯和知識：

lavish豐富的；浪費['læv??]

remunerative有利可圖的[r?'mju?n(?)r?t?v]

comet彗星['k?m?t]

carnage大屠殺；殘殺['kɑ?n?d?]

malingerer裝病逃差者[m?'l??g?r?]

nebulous 朦朧的；星云的['nebj?l?s]

squall暴風；麻煩；尖叫[skw??l]

agile敏捷的；機敏的['æd?a?l]

banishment流放，充軍['bæn??m?nt]

frivolity輕浮；輕薄[fr?'v?l?t?]

Why be a doctor when you can have real status?（785 words）

By Janan Ganesh

These are the jobs of my dozen or so closest friends: foreign-exchange trader, strategic consultant, political consultant, advertiser, something in a hedge fund, property entrepreneur, tech entrepreneur, broadcast journalist, print journalist, data scientist, public relations man, diplomat, central bank official and one that escapes simple description but appears to be another species of consultant.

All of us have nice lives — nicer than most of us were brought up to expect — and feel central to the action. The more stressful of these jobs have lavish financial compensations while the less remunerative ones, which still pay several multiples of the average income, come with travel opportunities, intellectual stimulus, private club memberships and social invitations.

Such a handsome return on work that does not matter all that much. With one exception (an intelligence agent), I am not close to anyone who toils in the realm of life and death. Just one of us knows his way around a hard science. Faced with a comet that promises human extinction, the government in Deep Impact builds a bunker for people with vital skills so that civilisation might revive once the carnage is over. No one I know would make the cut. We would be squished with the other malingerers and non-essentials. Outside of disaster-movie plot lines, though, we have a cushier time of it than doctors, engineers and research scientists, despite our shallower learning, our nebulous job titles, our inferior contribution to the advancement of the species.

Since the populist squall of 2016, so much has been said about the inequities between rich and poor, the material rewards for higher education against those for manual labour. Less is said about the inequities between educated people — the internal hierarchy of the graduate world. One of the stories of my lifetime has been the de-glamorisation of traditional careers to the advantage of looser, vaguer lines of work. The new elite do jobs that require agile intellect rather than deep, specific knowledge. They tend to handle ideas or the flow of money. And — the defining characteristic, this — their jobs are hard to explain to anyone over a certain age. Try telling your parents, as a few of my friends have to, that you earn many times their combined peak income for advice to corporate clients that can never be provably right or wrong.

You can see the change play out within immigrant families. The first generation tells its children to enter the established professions for reasons of security and respectability. Those children, wiser to the ways of their new homeland, then encourage their own to load up on generalist education and improvise a career from there. The point is not just to survive the rise of automation but also to have fun and influence, to sense where social status lies in highly evolved, service-based economies and to hoard it.

I was brought up to view a doctor as a kind of secular god. I now see a Stakhanovite soul who must train for seven years, work epic hours, accept postings where they arise, get to know human suffering from the inside out and observe a strict code on pain of eternal banishment from the profession — all for material comforts, calculated on a pay-per-hour basis, that kick in not much earlier than middle age. The job commands as much respect as it ever did, but some of the perceived lustre has gone. Friends who had the academic potential to pursue medicine sensed early on that the real fun, the highest social status and the best money-to-work ratio can now be found in frothier careers.

And as these jobs proliferate, people who do work of existential importance become creatures of fascination. Consider the boom in memoirs from the heavyweight professions. Henry Marsh has just published his second account of life as a neurosurgeon. Mark Owen has written two books on his time as a Navy Seal, including one that majors on the assassination of Osama bin Laden. Even Skyfaring, by commercial airline pilot Mark Vanhoenacker, fits the trend. He has hard knowledge, after all, and a technical skill without which the world as we know it could not function.

The success of these books hinges on the authorial talent of their creators — their way with quotidian detail, in particular — but there is as much of demand as of supply in this literary phenomenon. Readers want to know about “proper jobs” precisely because there are so few of them around now. A surgeon or soldier is all the more interesting in a society where most people — whether in call centres or trading floors — do nothing tangible for their income. It is the compliment that frivolity pays to seriousness, and the present pays to the past.