Vancouver real estate prices continue climb, projected to skyrocket

In my line of work I've found this to be completely untrue.

But you've pretty much agreed with everything I've said.

As a result, they have acquired knowledge and skills that cannot be found in many other people.

What I meant was that after decades in school, doctors have skills and knowledge which few other people have. So they cannot be replaced with someone who does not have similar skills and knowledge.

For photography, as you said, anyone can buy a $400 dsl and produce acceptable results. I have no doubt a pro can get better results, but as long as the results are acceptable, an amateur can easily replace a pro. For medicine, that does not work. You cannot have an amateur treating patients. This means that before you are allowed to treat patients, you need decades of education combined with many board exams.

At the end of the day, a doctor can only be replaced by a handful of people whereas a photographer can be replaced by many. This is the biggest driving force in how much someone gets paid.

Even if the photographer currently works twice as hard as the doctor, the doctor will always make more money. I'm not saying it's fair, it's just economics that drives this.

To say anyone gets to where they are through "hard work and dedication" is an exaggeration at best.

One of the points I was trying to make above is that the amount of hard work you do right now is not the biggest driving force for how much you get paid. The hard work is what happened for the doctor to get where she is. Working reasonable hard to get As in grade school so that high school GPA is good. Then college, med school and finally residency. That is where the hard work happened and that is where the that person became hard to replace. There simply aren't that many people who have worked that hard from a young age.

tl;dr: how good you are is irrelevant, what matters is if you can be replaced by someone who can get acceptable results.

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