While we fail to see any occupations listed for "insider trading hedge fund managers" or "high frequency market manipulators" in the just released list by the BLS [5] listing the number of workers and wages earned for all official US occupations, we supposed it will have to do, incomplete as it may be.
Below, sorted by average annual wage, are the Top 20 best paying jobs in the US including the average hourly wage and also showing the number of people the BLS believes are employed in each, seasonally adjusted of course.
[6]
And here are the bottom 20, or worst-paying, US jobs. It is here the the minimum-wage debate is most acute... As is the debate just how motivated the workers in these 20 occupations really are.
[7]
Curious how many total workers are employed in the Top and Bottom 20 jobs? Here is the answer:
[8]
What may be more surprising is that while there are 8 times as many workers in the worst paid bucket as best-paid, the total compensation paid to these two extreme groups is virtually identical.
[9]
Moral of the story: Don't become a line cook, kids, unless of course when one adds up all the welfare and insolvent state benefits provided to line cooks, the after tax cash flow matches or beats that of anesthesiologists.