March 14, 2019 Thursday
Bedtime Story
Principles of Economics (1890)
It made me understand the legal position of
a doctor in the society who is no doubt respected and valued but at the same
time given no extra privilege or special position when it comes to civil rights
or criminal jurisprudence.
Tonight we shall go through one of the
passages written by British economist Alfred Marshall from his seminal book
“Principles of Economics” (1890) before we return to our story of National
Resident Matching Program.
“The efficiency as compared with the cost of
almost every class of labor, is thus continually being weighed in the balance
in one or more branches of production against some other classes of labor: and
each of these in its turn against others.
This competition is primarily “vertical”:
it is a struggle for the field of employment between groups of labor belonging
to different grades, but engaged in the same branch of production, and
inclosed, as it were between the same vertical walls.
But meanwhile “horizontal” competition is
always at work, and by simpler methods: firstly, there is great freedom of
movement of adults from one business to another within each trade; and
secondly, parents can generally introduce their children into almost any other
trade of the same grade with their own in their neighborhood.
By means of this combined vertical and
horizontal competition there is an effective and closely adjusted balance of
payments to services as between labor in different grades; in spite of the fact
that labor in any one grade is mostly recruited even now from the children of
those in the same grade.
The working of the principle of
substitution is thus chiefly indirect.
When two tanks containing fluid are joined
by a pipe, the fluid, which is near the pipe in the tank with the higher level,
will flow into the other, even though it be rather viscous; and thus the
general levels of the tanks will tend to be brought together, though no fluid
may flow from the further end of the one to the further end of the other; and
if several tanks are connected by pipes, the fluid in all will tend to be at
the same level, though some tanks have no direct connection with each other.
And similarly the principle of substitution
is constantly ending by indirect routes to apportion earnings to efficiency
between trades, and even between grades, which are not directly in contact with
one another, and which appear at first sight to have no way of competing with
each other.”
This in essence (the way I view it) stresses
that a physician is just another labor in the free market and his income or
salary will be dependent on competition and pressures within the market.
Ideally health care of the population
should not be relegated to the markets and the society has to ensure that
through taxation and its government it ensures universal health care.
This though is s very utopian and idealistic
dream it is hardly implementable for most societies for variable reasons.
In most societies it is generally a mixed
form of health care system with the governments trying their best to deliver
whatever they can specially in the remote areas where private health care is
loath to venture.
Stay tuned to the voice of an
average story storytelling chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night Mon Ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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