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You can tell this is a poll of what people perceive to be the important jobs because doctor is #1. The most important jobs by sector in order of importance for developed nations is
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power supply- we all need electricity and few of us have the ability to generate it ourselves
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water supply- getting enough clean water for your day to cook and wash is a near full time job. For Americans a gallon of water is roughly 8lbs and your average toilet uses 3-5 gallons per flush. It would take much of the day to get and purify the water you use
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sanitation workers- this the poll got right. The folks collecting waste do more directly for public health than most doctors could hope to do.
I'm honestly surprised that cleaner and garbage collector are as high up there on the list as they are because those seem to be jobs that society generally looks down on.
At least the graphic has that going for it.
Wonder if it was a poll during 2020. COVID really highlighted cleaners' jobs as essential.
I wonder if doctors get elevated on these polls because people feel like it is a more unattainable skill.
I would imagine a lot of people (falsely) assume that it would be easy to plop people into power plants to keep them running, but harder to replace doctors.
My completely unknowledgeable take is that if we had to pick and choose people for the post apocalypse job hunt, we would want way more mechanics and engineers than doctors. Doctors need a lot of hard to obtain stuff to do the most doctor-ey part of their jobs, and if we aren't worried about laws and regulations, then we don't need them for things like prescriptions.
Most of what they would be needed for in that scenario to me seems like emergency care, like first aid, which you don't really need all the superfluous med school training for.
Meanwhile, the hydroelectric dam that the new post apocalypse group is forming at needs a lot of varied disciplines and specialties just to keep it running.
I love that hypothetical apocalyptical world were babies apparently don't exist, and therefore, a large chunk of the deaths that were pervasive in humanity until not too long ago also stopped existing
How is the doctor going to provide any legitimate care that the new technology of the world brings if there is no one to generate the power or source the complex and fragile medications and tools.
Do you think doctors will be administrating epidurals and doing c sections when the works ends? Hell, modern doctors only really work because of an entire industry of health care professionals that support them.
A doctor without pharmacology, engineering, clean rooms, manufacturing facilities, etc. is just a guy who can do first aid (and that's assuming they worked and studied in a field that would deal with immediate trauma scenarios). Doctors have benefits because they can capitalize on the support system that is international health care.
I have more confidence that an engineer could figure out how to repair, assemble, and operate an MRI machine than a doctor. I also have more confidence in the care that an EMT would provide if I'm lying bleeding.
90 percent of doctors are just dudes who mis diagnose women and minorities and spend most of their time writing prescriptions for tylenol.
When it comes down to what is actually necessary, I think most doctors are not, so if we are ranking professions based on their importance, I would rank the jobs that even enable doctors to do what they do higher.
Also, not to be morbid, but humanity fared pretty well up until now, and for most of the few hundred thousand years we have been around, we handled babies the same way the rest of the animal kingdom did, by just continuing to spit them out and hope for the best.
Hell, the biggest medical advances aren't even done by doctors they are done by scientists, doctors just apply shit they read out of a book.
lol was your ex a doctor? you're not wrong that a lot of what we do today is dependent on massive supply chains and the work of vast armies of allied healthcare workers, engineers, scientists, and pharma, but most doctors offer common sense remedies for common ailments and can be as simple as rest and fluids for a cold and heating packs for a sore back. even as someone who did trauma surgery for a while and now does robotic surgery, sure I won't be able to reconstruct your abdominal wall and safely reroute your intestines without modern anesthesia, ICUs, and antibiotics but even in modern times there are days that consist of hours of scraping old infected wounds, lancing boils/popping pimples, and talking about diet strategies to avoid hemorrhoids.
emts are valuable to stabilize and transport but can't care for things long term. engineers can build mris but can't interpret the fuzzy squiggles that pop up on the screen. I can distill my own alcohol for sterilization, hand weave silk/cotton sutures, and sharpen crude scalpels without modern technology. the biggest value I bring is my years of seeing sick people and figuring out what's actually bothering them without WebMD or ai, even if I don't have high tech solutions, ruling out the most dangerous potential diagnoses and finding the rare zebras.
edit: I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that you're either very young or very lucky with good health. not that I'm hoping you get sick but eventually all of us end up needing doctors to help us and when you do you'll see what I mean. even though I don't currently need any doctors myself, I'm very glad there are people out there that can help me when I need it.
your average toilet uses 3-5 gallons per flush
I’m pretty sure toilets generally use 1.6 gallons per flush, and that’s a legal mandate.
Source: used to have an autistic obsession with them.
What about the least essential?
- Tax consultants - helping companies avoid contributing to society
- Marketeers - manipulating people into buying worse products for higher prices
- Middle management - causing a lot of fuzz while doing nothing of significance.
Just to name a few. An artists contribution may be abstract but it's certainly there. There are others that actively sabotage society and very often they make a lot of money.
I assume this is why we hear about foreign actors targeting power stations more than hospitals.
Without power all those hospitals are nearly useless. Sure there are backup generators but they only run the bare minimum and only for so long.
Disable the power grid and the affects will be catastrophic on any developed nation. All the food will be spoiled within a few days to a few weeks. No business will be able to run including gas stations. Most communication will be down.
The whole area grinds to a halt untill power can be restored. Do enough damage to take out the power for a week to a large city and the damage will be incalculable. Not to mention the lives lost in that time.
This is also why GWB tried to redo the US electrical grid but failed. It is a huge target that needs to be updated.
For modern society, sure. For foundational society, you don't have any societies without Farmers, Educators, and some sort of doctor.
We had hunter gatherer societies with none of those jobs.
Sure, but we didn't have even ancient cities without them
Cites come after societies form though so they aren't foundational.
I had similar thoughts. Someone more knowledgeable would probably call them "healthcare professionals", or "healthcare practitioners", not "doctors and nurses".
And you're right, as important as they are, they can't do their jobs without the infrastructure you're pointing out. Power and water are more essential, as they enable everyone all of the time. And waste piling up would create serious problems fairly quickly.
This reminds me of the Silo series, where every level thinks they keep the Silo running.
A quick image search returned this
https://mothership.sg/2020/06/milieu-survey-sunday-times-essential/
So many commenters are missing crucial context to this infographic.
This was released during peak covid and I mean PEAK as in June 2020, global lockdowns, high mortality rates, shortages of essentials. In case anyone has a short memory, the world as we knew it practically ground to a halt.
Not to take away anything from artists but essential in this context meant essential to the basic human needs. Health, Nutrition, Sanitation.
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