Affluence in The United States - Professions

Professions

The vast majority of Americans derive the majority of their income from occupational earnings. Income derived from an occupation is largely determined by scarcity and the economic law of supply and demand. The more demand for a certain specialty and the less supply, the higher the income. There has been shown to be a correlation between increases in income and increases in worker satisfaction. The decrease in worker dissatisfaction, however, is not solely a result of the increase in income. Workers in more complex and higher level occupations tend to have attained higher levels of education and thus are more likely to have a greater degree of autonomy in the workplace.

Additionally higher level workers with advanced degrees are hired to share their personal knowledge, to conceptualize, and to consult. Higher-level workers suffer less job alienation and reap not only external benefits in terms of income from their jobs, but also enjoy high levels of intrinsic motivation and satisfaction.

In the United States the highest earning occupational group is white collar professionals. Individuals in this occupational classification tend to experience the highest job satisfaction and highest incomes. Defining income based on title of a profession is fairly inaccurate, given that a professional title may indicate the type of education received, but does not always correlate with the actual day to day income producing endeavors that are pursued. Some sources cite the profession of physician in the United States as the highest paying,

Physician (M.D. and D.O.) compensation ranks as the highest median annual earnings of any profession. Median annual earnings ranged from $156,010 for family physicians to $321,686 for anesthesiologists. Surgeons post a median annual income of $282,504. However, the annual salary for Chief Executive Officer (C.E.O.) is projected quite differently based on source: Salary.com reports a median salary of $634,941, while the U.S. Department of Labor in May 2004 reported the median as $140,350. This is primarily due to a methodological difference in terms of which companies were surveyed. Overall annual earnings among the nation's top 25 professions ranged from the $70,000s to the $300,000s. In addition to physicians, lawyers, physicists, and nuclear engineers were all among the nation's 20 highest paid occupations with incomes in excess of $78,410.

Some of the other occupations in the high five-figure range were economists with a median of $72,780, mathematicians with $81,240, financial managers with $81,880, and software publishers with median annual earnings of $73,060. Median annual of wage-and-salary pharmacists in May 2006 were $94,520. Median annual of wage-and-salary engineers in November 2011 were $90,000. The middle 50 percent earned between $83,180 and $108,140 a year (as in the Occupational Outlook Handbook, 2008–09 Edition by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics).