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Here's a quotation from the article: "Defenders of occupational licensing typically argue that the rules help protect consumers and workers, and that’s undoubt

Here's a quotation from the article: "Defenders of occupational licensing typically argue that the rules help protect consumers and workers, and that’s undoubtedly true in some cases. I want the people filling my cavities to know what they’re doing. But it’s hard not to suspect that in many cases, these rules serve another purpose: to make it harder for new competitors to enter the marketplace." While the article seems to criticize rent-seeking behavior only in businesses and professions that require lower levels of education, if we combine this article's statements with the often repeated claim that the US pays roughly twice as much for health care per capita as other developed countries it seems reasonable to ask: Is there a rent seeking problem in the medical and dental fields too? OTOH, why does the article's author want to deny the poor and less well educated segment of the small business community its fair share of the economic protection which occupational licensing offers?

seibelj 11y ago
It is logical to require you to have a license to fill a cavity for safety reasons. It is not logical to require a license to cut hair. Yes, it will boost earnings of barbers, who are generally lower-middle class, but it simply doesn't make logical sense.
- nedwin 11y ago
  I'm also not so sure that occupational licensing is the primary driver of the cost of healthcare in the US.
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    Is there a primary driver? It seems to me that it's the effect of many forces, each of which is probably worth addressing. When I get medical bills, I have a lot of difficulty trying to figure out why the service I consumed could possibly cost as much as I am being charged. But I apparently agreed to pay whatever as a condition of obtaining the service.
- pdonis 11y ago
  > It is logical to require you to have a license to fill a cavity for safety reasons. It is not logical to require a license to cut hair. You mean there are no "safety reasons" involved in cutting hair? A person with sharp implements around your head and neck poses no safety risk? Also, even if the "safety reasons" are more compelling for dentists than for barbers, that's still not a reason to have the government doing the safety checks by means of licensing. Private organizations could do the same safety checks--plus, they would have an incentive to do only the checks that actually added value, whereas government has an incentive to impose any requirements that have enough of a political constituency, whether or not they add value.
  - krapp 11y ago
    >Private organizations could do the same safety checks--plus, they would have an incentive to do only the checks that actually added value, "value" wouldn't have to mean increased safety for the consumer, though. The incentive on the part of private enterprise could just as well be to impose any requirements that increase profits, whether or not they add value.
    - pdonis 11y ago
      If there is no government regulation to impose restrictions by force, then a requirement that doesn't add value can't increase profits, because customers won't accept it; there will always be some competitor who sees the potential to out-compete you by not having a requirement that customers don't want.
      - notahacker 11y ago
        Which is nice in theory, but absolute nonsense in practice, as evidenced by the number of no-value-add diploma mill accreditors and homeopathic regulatory bodies even under a regulatory regime where organizations can actually potentially be prosecuted for deliberately misleading people.
        pdonis 11y ago
- VLM 11y ago
  I've looked into it because its been a traditional straw dog for decades. The stereotypical image of an all male barber shop giving men buzz cuts with a clipper is appealingly boring, but the work clusters inseparably with womens beautician type work, and that work can be crazy. They use corrosive dyes and peroxides and bleaches that will damage your skin or destroy your eyes both as a victim or as an employee. Used correctly its safe as a surgery scalpel. They insist on mixing technologies that are very problematic for the general untrained public to mix, like water and electricity, as either victim or employee. There can be disease issues, not quite of the level of a biohazard lab, but you want at least some minimal standards and of course some of the chemicals used for sterilization are not necessarily safe for the general public to screw around with as either victim or employee. This was a "local news issue" a couple years ago where the big bad state was attacking "retired beauticians cutting hair in their basement part time" but they carefully don't mention its more than cutting hair, there are open containers of high strength hydrogen peroxide in a residential house with kids in it, or the hair dryer not plugged into a GFCI outlet next to the running water sink, etc. WRT danger and risk its about one or two steps beneath the truck driver with a CDL and hazmat cert, or the electrician who does the wiring for a public pool, or the welder at the local nuclear plant... and the hoops to jump thru are also, appropriately, about one or two steps lower. From a high risk down view as opposed to low risk looking up, its not unreasonable. If you propose separation of the harmless hair cutting stuff from dangerous stuff, then the tear jerking starts about problems of scale and unless there is a level playing field of identical training only giant salons will be able to afford the specialized and soon to be rare training to color hair or whatever. It makes a great straw dog, but is a pretty good match compared to other fields.
- deleted 11y ago
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- Spooky23 11y ago
  Grooming trades have an element of skill and licensure ensures that people with the license have a known level of competency.
  - CountSessine 11y ago
    Who cares? So does competition. If a bad dentist is allowed to operate, they can permanently damage your teeth. If you get a bad haircut, wait a couple of weeks for it to grow out and in the meantime tell everyone you know where you got your bad haircut.
    - Spooky23 11y ago
      Bad dentists do operate. Guess how we deal with that? Take away the license. And as others have pointed out, it's more than a bad haircut at stake. Especially if you're a female -- some jackass wielding some dye or chemical can damage your hair or scalp permanently. It's easy to criticize this stuff when you live in a society where you benefit from a well-regulated trade in all manner of services.
      - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
        I'd argue that a botched dental surgery is at least as damaging (if not more, its actual fucking surgery!) than a botched hair dye. As much as a bad hair dye can fuck your hair up, dentists actually cut into people.
        Spooky23 11y ago
        The two aren't mutually exclusive. There may be some free-market lunatic who is in favor of unlicensed Dentistry, but I am not one of them.
  - marincounty 11y ago
    Licence them fine! Don't require them to go to school. The schools are a rip-off. I had a girlfriend who went, and she was charged $15,000 (They didn't even teach her the dangers of hair straightening products. We had to learn this information on our own.) So many currently licensed professions should remove the school requirement. If you can pass a Hard state test, why not issue a licence? Of the top of my head get rid of the education requirement for contractors, realtors(get rid of this profession all together, never understood the need for them.). In California, under certain circumstances you can sit for the bar exam without going to school. I always felt if you can pass the bar, especially a hard exam, like CA, NY, why not let the person practice? Why make them go to joke non-ABA approved schools, and then take the test? Or, waste money in ABA approved law schools? Especially these days, when we have the Internet?
- jonesb6 11y ago
  Anyone whose ever been to a bad dentist would see the merit in this. I used to go to a "budget" dentist when I was a kid and had very painful experiences, it can be excruciatingly painful if the dentist doesn't know what he's doing.. or doesn't care. This is not a point that transfers 1:1 to a hair stylist.. the odds and consequence of a stylist cutting me vs a dentist tapping a nerve is.. huge.
  - skylan_q 11y ago
    Anyone whose ever been to a bad dentist would see the merit in this. I have been to a bad dentist after my dentist moved. He was licensed. I told everyone who asked that he was a bad dentist and I found a better one. I don't see how licensing makes a difference.
    - jonesb6 11y ago
      I would argue that licensing drives up the average quality of the professional. This should be necessary for a profession that can cause pain (or hand out drugs) like dentistry, but not for something like a hair stylist where it wouldn't really matter.
    - ddingus 11y ago
      The difference is a bad experience and real harm. When anyone can practice dentistry, both the range of bad experiences and their distribution gets much worse.
- grogenaut 11y ago
  I mean if you don't want your barber / stylist to understand that you should clean your implements to prevent the spread of things like lice, sure there's nothing to cutting hair. Sometimes this license is very light like "yeah I can pass a written driving test".
  - Dylan16807 11y ago
    You can just tell someone to clean things. That doesn't require a training program with certification.
    - ddingus 11y ago
      That certification also funds inspections to insure they are actually doing it.
      - Godel_unicode 11y ago
        Potentially relevant if, like me, you're curious about studies into the effectiveness of random inspections: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6083/907 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6083/907
        ddingus 11y ago
        Good read. Thanks.
  - rbobby 11y ago
    Not just lice... hepatitis can spread through poorly clean manicure tools.
    - Godel_unicode 11y ago
      As far as I'm aware, there are very few manicure tools used in the cutting and braiding of hair. Consider that this type of over thinking might be a large part of the reason for these licensing requirements.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- maxsilver 11y ago
  > It is logical to require you to have a license to fill a cavity for safety reasons. It is not logical to require a license to cut hair. It actually is logical to require a license to cut hair, specifically for safety reasons you mention. Barbers / Hair Stylists are waving sharp pointy blades around your scalp, eyes, ears, mouth. If you don't know what your doing, you can cut or seriously injure someone (even just accidentally). Additionally, those tools are easy transmission vectors for diseases (both from potential cuts, and from bugs like lice). It doesn't take a lot of training, the two years for licenses mentioned in the article is ridiculous and should be reduced. (As an example, Michigan's license requirements are less than half the time+cost of Nevada's requirements mentioned in the article). But Barbers have been licensed for 70-100 years (depending on the state), and there's a good reason for that -- you really do want to ensure everyone practicing that profession has some basic safety training and experience first, and the government seems like the best organization to ensure happens.
  - dragonwriter 11y ago
    > Additionally, those tools are easy transmission vectors for diseases (both from potential cuts, and from bugs like lice). And, note, this creates a public health issue, not just one affecting their direct customers (even though the direct effect is on customers.)
  - mistermann 11y ago
    You could make a similar argument for every employee that works in the food industry, including the entire supply chain. Personally I find an $8 combo at Macdonald's expensive enough, we'd be looking at $12+ if everyone had a "proper" level of training.
    - cturner 11y ago
      Macdonalds is interesting because they already have a strong internal training program, and food handling is one of the issues they take care of (to a standard higher than most regimes they operate in).
    - EliRivers 11y ago
the_watcher 11y ago
> Is there a rent seeking problem in the medical and dental fields too? It certainly is. It's just that the crux of this article is that occupational licensing for low or medium skilled trades is inherently problematic rent-seeking, whereas the requirement for a license to practice medicine or dentistry isn't itself a problem, it's the artificial limiting of those who can get the license that presents a problem.
- msabalau 11y ago
  The article looks forward to a bright future where people who cut hair can earn much less than the current median wage of $11.12 an hour.
  - lg 11y ago
    if you want to keep up wages, then why artificially inflate the price of going into business (which just prevents potential entrants from offering a better product than incumbents) when you can instead.. artificially inflate wages directly with a higher minimum?
    - HillaryBriss 11y ago
      Could we have a multi-pronged approach? Minimum wage of $12 or $15 is great, but in many places still not a true middle class wage, especially for a head of household. But, still it's a worthwhile law to put on the books and it does help entry level workers and others. On top of that, union wages are great for those who are in them and actually have enough work to be full time. In addition, to address another group in society, we can empower service providers who are small business owners with state licensing boards to help them control their market segment and truly attain durable middle class living standards. We can have it all. What's not to love?
      - bzbarsky 11y ago
        What's not to love is that money doesn't come from nowhere. So if we set up service providers with a way to prevent new entrants into the market, what that means is that they get monopoly-like control over pricing (because the simplest mechanism for fighting that is new market entrants) and then that means that everyone overpays for their services. Including the people who now discover that their $12 or $15 wage is still not enough. Or put another way, the technical term for "small business owners who control their market segment" is "cartel"...
fennecfoxen 11y ago
> why does the article's author want to deny the poor and less well educated segment of the small business community its fair share of the economic protection which occupational licensing offers? Well, obviously, no one deserves a particular "fair share" of a business. That's basically saying that they own a certain number of people as customers, which is almost like micro-slavery. (And if there's enough businesses where someone owns the rights to you as a customer, it gets progressively more and more so.) But beyond that, who would be the competition for the "poor and less well educated segment of the small business community" afforded protection? Surely a new entrant into the hair-braiding business is more likely to be poorer and less-well educated than someone who is already in the business and influential enough to be lobbying occupational licensing boards.
- eli_gottlieb 11y ago
  >That's basically saying that they own a certain number of people as customers, which is almost like micro-slavery. No, it's slavery when you own a certain number of people as workers.
- eru 11y ago
  I think you missed the snark in the line you replied to.
Spooky23 11y ago
The real purpose of combating "rent seeking" in healthcare is to displace RNs with lower skilled LPNs, CNAs and other aides. Since nurses actually deliver your care and have the training to actually help you, it is a cost saving measure of dubious value. Of course, insurers and hospital cartels aren't rent seeking!
trgn 11y ago
That struck me too: No mention of doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, architects, librarians, actuarians, dentists, pharmacists .. in that article. These all professionalized in the late 19th/early 20th century, to great benefit of practitioners in these fields, in terms of remuneration or job security or even both. If those get to benefit from rent seeking, it is not surprising that others would seek the same advantage.
- ethbro 11y ago
  To be fair, as someone with a fair number of doctor friends, the other side of the equation is equally important. In the US, we have a fair number of "must be this well educated in the field to work" legal requirements in these fields. In terms of, if someone walked in off the street, tried to X, and screwed it up, then there would be fairly serious consequences of the screw up. We expect excellence (or at least competency), which means education, which means substantial upfront monetary investment in oneself to prepare for profession X. Certainly there's a lot of archaic & unmodernized baggage in these fields, but the basic bargain of "if you put up your own money (or borrow) to successfully train yourself in these fields, then we will provide some stability on the demand side to bound your risk." And before it gets tossed out, no, the amount of education to become a practicing software engineer in the US is nothing like any of the above fields in terms of financial risk and calendar time learning.
  - trgn 11y ago
    A goal of professionalization was to restrict entry in the profession, to ensure job security. This happened across the board in a wide variety of fields. Mostly college educated work. Later, labor movements were successful in pushing licensing requirements for trade workers as well. Your argument reads a little like an after the fact rationalization. Yes, we need good doctors, but that's not the reason why SelfStudy Steve can't practice wart removal or write medical marijuana prescriptions without an MD. Physicians have been very succesful in defending the status quo. One particular sleight of hands is perpetuating the myth that the financial commitment when entering medschool is akin to taking a risk. It is decidedly not because the payoff is virtually guaranteed. I'm not necessarily disagreeing, don't get me wrong, that we need skilled medical practitioners, but the profession is the text-book example of rent-seeking, yet somehow it's unseemly to say this out loud. Anyways, I don't want to make it seem like doctors don't deserve their pay. That's a different question But I think it is perfectly OK for barbers to pursue job security, and do so through means that have a proven track record. A small unrelated comment, and I forget where I picked this up, but it tickles my funny bone and just wanted to share. Paradoxically, the professions that are least likely to be able to guarantee a successful outcome, are paid the most. For example, engineers can reasonably guarantee the bridge will stay upright. Once the work is completed, the client too can easily evaluate by having their donkey walk over it first. A librarian can usually say if she'll find an original primary source within a collection, and the patron can verify with a certain amount of confidence when taking delivery that he's handed the real deal. However, a lawyer will most likely hem and haw if you ask if he can win your case. If you end up losing, it'll be because of a biased jury, or unfavourable public opinion, perhaps the judge was drunk. Grandma died from that infection? The doctor will say it was old age, or the cancer was really strong, or "god works in mysterious ways". And when you are an insurer, did your actuarian really miscalcute the fire risk in that new township, or do you take him at his word and was it really just all a minuscule coincidence that the place burned down? The bolder the bluff, the higher the reward. Because you didn't go to law school, how would you know if the lawyer didn't miss this&that amendment to this&that ordinance? You didn't go to med school, so how would you know that the doctor did not wing it that particular night, paying more attention to his fantasy football game than meemaw? And are you confident enough in your high school maths to verify the calculations that yielded that bad actuarial table? Anybody can recognize a bad from a good haircut though.
zafka 11y ago
> Is there a rent seeking problem in the medical and dental fields too? Take a look inside any Medical device company (or Pharma) So much time is spent on FDA compliance most engineers spend 85% of their time killing trees. Now these companies charge extremely high prices for their goods, but no new company can afford to spend the THree to five years getting something to market.And Here I am talking simple devices, not drugs. While the industry complains about the FDA, It is just this problem that builds a moat around the industry.
coldtea 11y ago
>While the article seems to criticize rent-seeking behavior only in businesses and professions that require lower levels of education, if we combine this article's statements with the often repeated claim that the US pays roughly twice as much for health care per capita as other developed countries it seems reasonable to ask: Is there a rent seeking problem in the medical and dental fields too? Western countries with same or even stricter bars to become a doctor/dentist etc manage to have 1/3 to 1/10 the prices the US has. So I don't think it's "rent seeking" that's responsible for this. I'd put the blame more on insurance companies and the bizarro US ideas about employment insurance and healthcare. Nor I think "occupational licensing" for e.g. cabs which can be considered rent-seeking is the same as requiring higher levels of education from doctors, lawyers and such things.
- rogerbinns 11y ago
  > So I don't think it's "rent seeking" that's responsible for this. It isn't entirely responsible, just as no other factor is entirely responsible. But they sure do reinforce each other. For example rent seeking by the AMA means that doctors cost more. Because doctors cost more, more people who need doctor services will need a payment obfuscation service (aka "health insurance"). Because "health insurance" is doing a lot of the paying, it encourages other parties (eg medicine and equipment) to rent seek against them, as it is easier to convince one party than every patient. I'll stop here, but can keep going!
- bzbarsky 11y ago
  > So I don't think it's "rent seeking" that's responsible for this. It totally is. The AMA get to accredit, or not, medical schools. They also get to set rules for doctors with non-US training to be able to practice in the US. The result is that the number of medical school slots has historically not remotely kept pace with population growth, while doctors from other countries face a pretty uphill battle unless they go to medical school in the US. The net result is artificial limits on the number of doctors who graduate from medical school. This has several effects, of which the most important are the insane hours demanded from medical residents (and all the errors they make as a result) and the high pay of doctors. This last provides the incentive for the AMA to not increase the number of available medical school slots and leads to the observed differences in the income doctors get in the US and elsewhere. Of course, in the wake of new rules to limit the insanity of medical resident hours the number of medical school slots in the US went up by 30% or so in the last 6 years. We'll see what that does to salaries going forward, but I'm pretty sure the effect will be downward salary pressure.
WalterBright 11y ago
The history of licensing of doctors and dentists is covered in the book "Competition And Monopoly In Medical Care" by Frech. Much of the motivation for licensing was reducing the number of doctors so they could raise prices. Licensing also enabled pervasive discrimination against Jewish, black, and female doctors (pg. 54). "one benefit of licensure requires that it confer monopoly rents upon physicians." pg. 58 There's a lot more in the book.
- brightball 11y ago
  Exactly. We don't have a cost problem, we have a supply and demand problem. Larger supply of doctors, nurses, generic drugs and competition will naturally drive down price. All of the other mechanisms in place prevent that.
  - mistermann 11y ago
    Don't forget collusion - my dentist apparently has lots of slack in her business, I am constantly getting calls to book an appointment. I'll let you guess whether she's offered more competitive pricing to increase her bookings....
    - iofj 11y ago
      Given that very few of her customers actually pay for their visits ... do you think that would help, or just be a huge obstacle in her negotiating with insurance providers ?
- _delirium 11y ago
  I can believe that was a motivation, but it's quite possible to have a licensing system for doctors and at the same time keep costs in check. For example European countries typically have much lower healthcare costs than the U.S. (even after taking into account tax money spent on the sector), despite still stringent licensing requirements for doctors. The U.S.'s system is a particularly bad case of letting the inmates run the asylum, so to speak, both on the occupational licensing side, and on the drug side (the other half of the cost equation, where e.g. Medicare is statutorily prohibited from negotiating prices with pharmaceutical companies).
lucaspiller 11y ago
One of the issues in the US vs other countries is that the licenses for a lot of these sort of things are per state and the requirements vary drastically. There was an article here a while ago about a nurse who moved state, but had to transfer her qualification too which took about six months. In the UK nurses must register with the governing body, but any qualification from the EU is equally valid [0]. [0] https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/i-am/outside-uk/information-overseas-nurses https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/i-am/outside-uk/information...
dragonwriter 11y ago
> While the article seems to criticize rent-seeking behavior only in businesses and professions that require lower levels of education, if we combine this article's statements with the often repeated claim that the US pays roughly twice as much for health care per capita as other developed countries it seems reasonable to ask: Is there a rent seeking problem in the medical and dental fields too? Wait, are you suggesting that the regulatory barriers to private competition in medicine and dentistry are higher in the US than other developed countries?

seibelj 11y ago

It is logical to require you to have a license to fill a cavity for safety reasons. It is not logical to require a license to cut hair. Yes, it will boost earnings of barbers, who are generally lower-middle class, but it simply doesn't make logical sense.

nedwin 11y ago
I'm also not so sure that occupational licensing is the primary driver of the cost of healthcare in the US.
- maxerickson 11y ago
  Is there a primary driver? It seems to me that it's the effect of many forces, each of which is probably worth addressing. When I get medical bills, I have a lot of difficulty trying to figure out why the service I consumed could possibly cost as much as I am being charged. But I apparently agreed to pay whatever as a condition of obtaining the service.
pdonis 11y ago
> It is logical to require you to have a license to fill a cavity for safety reasons. It is not logical to require a license to cut hair. You mean there are no "safety reasons" involved in cutting hair? A person with sharp implements around your head and neck poses no safety risk? Also, even if the "safety reasons" are more compelling for dentists than for barbers, that's still not a reason to have the government doing the safety checks by means of licensing. Private organizations could do the same safety checks--plus, they would have an incentive to do only the checks that actually added value, whereas government has an incentive to impose any requirements that have enough of a political constituency, whether or not they add value.
- krapp 11y ago
  >Private organizations could do the same safety checks--plus, they would have an incentive to do only the checks that actually added value, "value" wouldn't have to mean increased safety for the consumer, though. The incentive on the part of private enterprise could just as well be to impose any requirements that increase profits, whether or not they add value.
  - pdonis 11y ago
    If there is no government regulation to impose restrictions by force, then a requirement that doesn't add value can't increase profits, because customers won't accept it; there will always be some competitor who sees the potential to out-compete you by not having a requirement that customers don't want.
    - notahacker 11y ago
      Which is nice in theory, but absolute nonsense in practice, as evidenced by the number of no-value-add diploma mill accreditors and homeopathic regulatory bodies even under a regulatory regime where organizations can actually potentially be prosecuted for deliberately misleading people.
      - pdonis 11y ago
VLM 11y ago
I've looked into it because its been a traditional straw dog for decades. The stereotypical image of an all male barber shop giving men buzz cuts with a clipper is appealingly boring, but the work clusters inseparably with womens beautician type work, and that work can be crazy. They use corrosive dyes and peroxides and bleaches that will damage your skin or destroy your eyes both as a victim or as an employee. Used correctly its safe as a surgery scalpel. They insist on mixing technologies that are very problematic for the general untrained public to mix, like water and electricity, as either victim or employee. There can be disease issues, not quite of the level of a biohazard lab, but you want at least some minimal standards and of course some of the chemicals used for sterilization are not necessarily safe for the general public to screw around with as either victim or employee. This was a "local news issue" a couple years ago where the big bad state was attacking "retired beauticians cutting hair in their basement part time" but they carefully don't mention its more than cutting hair, there are open containers of high strength hydrogen peroxide in a residential house with kids in it, or the hair dryer not plugged into a GFCI outlet next to the running water sink, etc. WRT danger and risk its about one or two steps beneath the truck driver with a CDL and hazmat cert, or the electrician who does the wiring for a public pool, or the welder at the local nuclear plant... and the hoops to jump thru are also, appropriately, about one or two steps lower. From a high risk down view as opposed to low risk looking up, its not unreasonable. If you propose separation of the harmless hair cutting stuff from dangerous stuff, then the tear jerking starts about problems of scale and unless there is a level playing field of identical training only giant salons will be able to afford the specialized and soon to be rare training to color hair or whatever. It makes a great straw dog, but is a pretty good match compared to other fields.
deleted 11y ago
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Spooky23 11y ago
Grooming trades have an element of skill and licensure ensures that people with the license have a known level of competency.
- CountSessine 11y ago
  Who cares? So does competition. If a bad dentist is allowed to operate, they can permanently damage your teeth. If you get a bad haircut, wait a couple of weeks for it to grow out and in the meantime tell everyone you know where you got your bad haircut.
  - Spooky23 11y ago
    Bad dentists do operate. Guess how we deal with that? Take away the license. And as others have pointed out, it's more than a bad haircut at stake. Especially if you're a female -- some jackass wielding some dye or chemical can damage your hair or scalp permanently. It's easy to criticize this stuff when you live in a society where you benefit from a well-regulated trade in all manner of services.
    - ZanyProgrammer 11y ago
      I'd argue that a botched dental surgery is at least as damaging (if not more, its actual fucking surgery!) than a botched hair dye. As much as a bad hair dye can fuck your hair up, dentists actually cut into people.
      - Spooky23 11y ago
        The two aren't mutually exclusive. There may be some free-market lunatic who is in favor of unlicensed Dentistry, but I am not one of them.
- marincounty 11y ago
  Licence them fine! Don't require them to go to school. The schools are a rip-off. I had a girlfriend who went, and she was charged $15,000 (They didn't even teach her the dangers of hair straightening products. We had to learn this information on our own.) So many currently licensed professions should remove the school requirement. If you can pass a Hard state test, why not issue a licence? Of the top of my head get rid of the education requirement for contractors, realtors(get rid of this profession all together, never understood the need for them.). In California, under certain circumstances you can sit for the bar exam without going to school. I always felt if you can pass the bar, especially a hard exam, like CA, NY, why not let the person practice? Why make them go to joke non-ABA approved schools, and then take the test? Or, waste money in ABA approved law schools? Especially these days, when we have the Internet?
jonesb6 11y ago
Anyone whose ever been to a bad dentist would see the merit in this. I used to go to a "budget" dentist when I was a kid and had very painful experiences, it can be excruciatingly painful if the dentist doesn't know what he's doing.. or doesn't care. This is not a point that transfers 1:1 to a hair stylist.. the odds and consequence of a stylist cutting me vs a dentist tapping a nerve is.. huge.
- skylan_q 11y ago
  Anyone whose ever been to a bad dentist would see the merit in this. I have been to a bad dentist after my dentist moved. He was licensed. I told everyone who asked that he was a bad dentist and I found a better one. I don't see how licensing makes a difference.
  - jonesb6 11y ago
    I would argue that licensing drives up the average quality of the professional. This should be necessary for a profession that can cause pain (or hand out drugs) like dentistry, but not for something like a hair stylist where it wouldn't really matter.
  - ddingus 11y ago
    The difference is a bad experience and real harm. When anyone can practice dentistry, both the range of bad experiences and their distribution gets much worse.
grogenaut 11y ago
I mean if you don't want your barber / stylist to understand that you should clean your implements to prevent the spread of things like lice, sure there's nothing to cutting hair. Sometimes this license is very light like "yeah I can pass a written driving test".
- Dylan16807 11y ago
  You can just tell someone to clean things. That doesn't require a training program with certification.
  - ddingus 11y ago
    That certification also funds inspections to insure they are actually doing it.
    - Godel_unicode 11y ago
      Potentially relevant if, like me, you're curious about studies into the effectiveness of random inspections: http://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6083/907 http://science.sciencemag.org/content/336/6083/907
      - ddingus 11y ago
        Good read. Thanks.
- rbobby 11y ago
  Not just lice... hepatitis can spread through poorly clean manicure tools.
  - Godel_unicode 11y ago
    As far as I'm aware, there are very few manicure tools used in the cutting and braiding of hair. Consider that this type of over thinking might be a large part of the reason for these licensing requirements.
deleted 11y ago
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maxsilver 11y ago
> It is logical to require you to have a license to fill a cavity for safety reasons. It is not logical to require a license to cut hair. It actually is logical to require a license to cut hair, specifically for safety reasons you mention. Barbers / Hair Stylists are waving sharp pointy blades around your scalp, eyes, ears, mouth. If you don't know what your doing, you can cut or seriously injure someone (even just accidentally). Additionally, those tools are easy transmission vectors for diseases (both from potential cuts, and from bugs like lice). It doesn't take a lot of training, the two years for licenses mentioned in the article is ridiculous and should be reduced. (As an example, Michigan's license requirements are less than half the time+cost of Nevada's requirements mentioned in the article). But Barbers have been licensed for 70-100 years (depending on the state), and there's a good reason for that -- you really do want to ensure everyone practicing that profession has some basic safety training and experience first, and the government seems like the best organization to ensure happens.
- dragonwriter 11y ago
  > Additionally, those tools are easy transmission vectors for diseases (both from potential cuts, and from bugs like lice). And, note, this creates a public health issue, not just one affecting their direct customers (even though the direct effect is on customers.)
- mistermann 11y ago
  You could make a similar argument for every employee that works in the food industry, including the entire supply chain. Personally I find an $8 combo at Macdonald's expensive enough, we'd be looking at $12+ if everyone had a "proper" level of training.
  - cturner 11y ago
    Macdonalds is interesting because they already have a strong internal training program, and food handling is one of the issues they take care of (to a standard higher than most regimes they operate in).
  - EliRivers 11y ago

the_watcher 11y ago

> Is there a rent seeking problem in the medical and dental fields too? It certainly is. It's just that the crux of this article is that occupational licensing for low or medium skilled trades is inherently problematic rent-seeking, whereas the requirement for a license to practice medicine or dentistry isn't itself a problem, it's the artificial limiting of those who can get the license that presents a problem.

msabalau 11y ago
The article looks forward to a bright future where people who cut hair can earn much less than the current median wage of $11.12 an hour.
- lg 11y ago
  if you want to keep up wages, then why artificially inflate the price of going into business (which just prevents potential entrants from offering a better product than incumbents) when you can instead.. artificially inflate wages directly with a higher minimum?
  - HillaryBriss 11y ago
    Could we have a multi-pronged approach? Minimum wage of $12 or $15 is great, but in many places still not a true middle class wage, especially for a head of household. But, still it's a worthwhile law to put on the books and it does help entry level workers and others. On top of that, union wages are great for those who are in them and actually have enough work to be full time. In addition, to address another group in society, we can empower service providers who are small business owners with state licensing boards to help them control their market segment and truly attain durable middle class living standards. We can have it all. What's not to love?
    - bzbarsky 11y ago
      What's not to love is that money doesn't come from nowhere. So if we set up service providers with a way to prevent new entrants into the market, what that means is that they get monopoly-like control over pricing (because the simplest mechanism for fighting that is new market entrants) and then that means that everyone overpays for their services. Including the people who now discover that their $12 or $15 wage is still not enough. Or put another way, the technical term for "small business owners who control their market segment" is "cartel"...

fennecfoxen 11y ago

> why does the article's author want to deny the poor and less well educated segment of the small business community its fair share of the economic protection which occupational licensing offers? Well, obviously, no one deserves a particular "fair share" of a business. That's basically saying that they own a certain number of people as customers, which is almost like micro-slavery. (And if there's enough businesses where someone owns the rights to you as a customer, it gets progressively more and more so.) But beyond that, who would be the competition for the "poor and less well educated segment of the small business community" afforded protection? Surely a new entrant into the hair-braiding business is more likely to be poorer and less-well educated than someone who is already in the business and influential enough to be lobbying occupational licensing boards.

eli_gottlieb 11y ago
>That's basically saying that they own a certain number of people as customers, which is almost like micro-slavery. No, it's slavery when you own a certain number of people as workers.
eru 11y ago
I think you missed the snark in the line you replied to.

Spooky23 11y ago

The real purpose of combating "rent seeking" in healthcare is to displace RNs with lower skilled LPNs, CNAs and other aides. Since nurses actually deliver your care and have the training to actually help you, it is a cost saving measure of dubious value. Of course, insurers and hospital cartels aren't rent seeking!

trgn 11y ago

That struck me too: No mention of doctors, lawyers, civil engineers, architects, librarians, actuarians, dentists, pharmacists .. in that article. These all professionalized in the late 19th/early 20th century, to great benefit of practitioners in these fields, in terms of remuneration or job security or even both. If those get to benefit from rent seeking, it is not surprising that others would seek the same advantage.

ethbro 11y ago
To be fair, as someone with a fair number of doctor friends, the other side of the equation is equally important. In the US, we have a fair number of "must be this well educated in the field to work" legal requirements in these fields. In terms of, if someone walked in off the street, tried to X, and screwed it up, then there would be fairly serious consequences of the screw up. We expect excellence (or at least competency), which means education, which means substantial upfront monetary investment in oneself to prepare for profession X. Certainly there's a lot of archaic & unmodernized baggage in these fields, but the basic bargain of "if you put up your own money (or borrow) to successfully train yourself in these fields, then we will provide some stability on the demand side to bound your risk." And before it gets tossed out, no, the amount of education to become a practicing software engineer in the US is nothing like any of the above fields in terms of financial risk and calendar time learning.
- trgn 11y ago
  A goal of professionalization was to restrict entry in the profession, to ensure job security. This happened across the board in a wide variety of fields. Mostly college educated work. Later, labor movements were successful in pushing licensing requirements for trade workers as well. Your argument reads a little like an after the fact rationalization. Yes, we need good doctors, but that's not the reason why SelfStudy Steve can't practice wart removal or write medical marijuana prescriptions without an MD. Physicians have been very succesful in defending the status quo. One particular sleight of hands is perpetuating the myth that the financial commitment when entering medschool is akin to taking a risk. It is decidedly not because the payoff is virtually guaranteed. I'm not necessarily disagreeing, don't get me wrong, that we need skilled medical practitioners, but the profession is the text-book example of rent-seeking, yet somehow it's unseemly to say this out loud. Anyways, I don't want to make it seem like doctors don't deserve their pay. That's a different question But I think it is perfectly OK for barbers to pursue job security, and do so through means that have a proven track record. A small unrelated comment, and I forget where I picked this up, but it tickles my funny bone and just wanted to share. Paradoxically, the professions that are least likely to be able to guarantee a successful outcome, are paid the most. For example, engineers can reasonably guarantee the bridge will stay upright. Once the work is completed, the client too can easily evaluate by having their donkey walk over it first. A librarian can usually say if she'll find an original primary source within a collection, and the patron can verify with a certain amount of confidence when taking delivery that he's handed the real deal. However, a lawyer will most likely hem and haw if you ask if he can win your case. If you end up losing, it'll be because of a biased jury, or unfavourable public opinion, perhaps the judge was drunk. Grandma died from that infection? The doctor will say it was old age, or the cancer was really strong, or "god works in mysterious ways". And when you are an insurer, did your actuarian really miscalcute the fire risk in that new township, or do you take him at his word and was it really just all a minuscule coincidence that the place burned down? The bolder the bluff, the higher the reward. Because you didn't go to law school, how would you know if the lawyer didn't miss this&that amendment to this&that ordinance? You didn't go to med school, so how would you know that the doctor did not wing it that particular night, paying more attention to his fantasy football game than meemaw? And are you confident enough in your high school maths to verify the calculations that yielded that bad actuarial table? Anybody can recognize a bad from a good haircut though.

zafka 11y ago

> Is there a rent seeking problem in the medical and dental fields too? Take a look inside any Medical device company (or Pharma) So much time is spent on FDA compliance most engineers spend 85% of their time killing trees. Now these companies charge extremely high prices for their goods, but no new company can afford to spend the THree to five years getting something to market.And Here I am talking simple devices, not drugs. While the industry complains about the FDA, It is just this problem that builds a moat around the industry.

coldtea 11y ago

>While the article seems to criticize rent-seeking behavior only in businesses and professions that require lower levels of education, if we combine this article's statements with the often repeated claim that the US pays roughly twice as much for health care per capita as other developed countries it seems reasonable to ask: Is there a rent seeking problem in the medical and dental fields too? Western countries with same or even stricter bars to become a doctor/dentist etc manage to have 1/3 to 1/10 the prices the US has. So I don't think it's "rent seeking" that's responsible for this. I'd put the blame more on insurance companies and the bizarro US ideas about employment insurance and healthcare. Nor I think "occupational licensing" for e.g. cabs which can be considered rent-seeking is the same as requiring higher levels of education from doctors, lawyers and such things.

rogerbinns 11y ago
> So I don't think it's "rent seeking" that's responsible for this. It isn't entirely responsible, just as no other factor is entirely responsible. But they sure do reinforce each other. For example rent seeking by the AMA means that doctors cost more. Because doctors cost more, more people who need doctor services will need a payment obfuscation service (aka "health insurance"). Because "health insurance" is doing a lot of the paying, it encourages other parties (eg medicine and equipment) to rent seek against them, as it is easier to convince one party than every patient. I'll stop here, but can keep going!
bzbarsky 11y ago
> So I don't think it's "rent seeking" that's responsible for this. It totally is. The AMA get to accredit, or not, medical schools. They also get to set rules for doctors with non-US training to be able to practice in the US. The result is that the number of medical school slots has historically not remotely kept pace with population growth, while doctors from other countries face a pretty uphill battle unless they go to medical school in the US. The net result is artificial limits on the number of doctors who graduate from medical school. This has several effects, of which the most important are the insane hours demanded from medical residents (and all the errors they make as a result) and the high pay of doctors. This last provides the incentive for the AMA to not increase the number of available medical school slots and leads to the observed differences in the income doctors get in the US and elsewhere. Of course, in the wake of new rules to limit the insanity of medical resident hours the number of medical school slots in the US went up by 30% or so in the last 6 years. We'll see what that does to salaries going forward, but I'm pretty sure the effect will be downward salary pressure.

WalterBright 11y ago

The history of licensing of doctors and dentists is covered in the book "Competition And Monopoly In Medical Care" by Frech. Much of the motivation for licensing was reducing the number of doctors so they could raise prices. Licensing also enabled pervasive discrimination against Jewish, black, and female doctors (pg. 54). "one benefit of licensure requires that it confer monopoly rents upon physicians." pg. 58 There's a lot more in the book.

brightball 11y ago
Exactly. We don't have a cost problem, we have a supply and demand problem. Larger supply of doctors, nurses, generic drugs and competition will naturally drive down price. All of the other mechanisms in place prevent that.
- mistermann 11y ago
  Don't forget collusion - my dentist apparently has lots of slack in her business, I am constantly getting calls to book an appointment. I'll let you guess whether she's offered more competitive pricing to increase her bookings....
  - iofj 11y ago
    Given that very few of her customers actually pay for their visits ... do you think that would help, or just be a huge obstacle in her negotiating with insurance providers ?
_delirium 11y ago
I can believe that was a motivation, but it's quite possible to have a licensing system for doctors and at the same time keep costs in check. For example European countries typically have much lower healthcare costs than the U.S. (even after taking into account tax money spent on the sector), despite still stringent licensing requirements for doctors. The U.S.'s system is a particularly bad case of letting the inmates run the asylum, so to speak, both on the occupational licensing side, and on the drug side (the other half of the cost equation, where e.g. Medicare is statutorily prohibited from negotiating prices with pharmaceutical companies).

lucaspiller 11y ago

One of the issues in the US vs other countries is that the licenses for a lot of these sort of things are per state and the requirements vary drastically. There was an article here a while ago about a nurse who moved state, but had to transfer her qualification too which took about six months. In the UK nurses must register with the governing body, but any qualification from the EU is equally valid [0]. [0] https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/i-am/outside-uk/information-overseas-nurses https://www.healthcareers.nhs.uk/i-am/outside-uk/information...

dragonwriter 11y ago