US Has Fewer Physicians Per Population Than Comparable Countries, More Hospital Administrators, Fewer Hospital Beds Per Person

From Peterson-KFF, Health System Tracker, "How do U.S. health care resources compare to other countries?" by Nicolas Shanosky, Daniel McDermott, and Nisha Kurani, Posted: August 12, 2020:

This chart collection looks at the availability of hospital resources and healthcare professionals in the United States and similarly wealthy countries. A related chart collection examines how the U.S.’s healthcare resources factor into the nation’s preparedness for the coronavirus pandemic.
***There are fewer physicians per capita in the U.S. than there are in most comparable countries

Source: Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker

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The U.S. has the highest percentage of specialists among comparable countries

Source: Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker

From Peterson-KFF, Health System Tracker, "How prepared is the US to respond to COVID-19 relative to other countries?" by Rabah Kamal, Nisha Kurani, Daniel McDermott, and Cynthia Cox, Posted: March 27, 2020:

***Compared to most similarly large and wealthy countries, the U.S. has fewer practicing physicians per capita but has a similar number of licensed nurses per capita. Looking specifically at the hospital setting, the U.S. has more hospital-based employees per capita than most other comparable countries, but nearly half of these hospital workers are non-clinical staff. Overall, the U.S. has fewer hospitals and hospital beds per capita compared to other similar countries.***U.S. hospitals have more employees than most comparable countries, but many are administrative

Source: Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker

***

The U.S. has fewer total hospital beds per person than similar countries

Source: Peterson-KFF Health System Tracker

Real Value of $100 In The US States: Map

From Tax Foundation, "What is the Real Value of $100 in Your State?" by Garrett Watson:

This map shows the real value of $100 in each state. Across the United States, the cost of living fluctuates, as prices for the same goods may be cheaper in some areas—such as rural parts of Arkansas or South Dakota—than in large cities in states like New York or California. This means that the same amount of money can buy comparatively more in a low-price state than a high-price state.

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Source: Tax Foundation

A Generation's Earning Power Will Be Lost From School Closures: Low Income Students Will Suffer The Most

From City Journal, "Don’t Cancel School: Prolonged closures are their own crisis." by Allison Schrager:

The American Academy of Pediatrics has stressed that reopening is critical for children’s emotional and educational development. There is also an overwhelming economic case to be made in favor of reopening. In fact, the cost of not reopening schools will last a generation. The benefits of universal education are so deep and well-documented that it’s unthinkable to consider discounting it for another semester. Education is the most effective means of economic mobility and is critical for long-term success. It explains much of America’s income growth and development in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Today, moreover, schools provide important child-care services. As Goldman Sachs found, if schools don’t open, an estimated 15 percent of America’s labor force can’t return to work.

The negative effects of closed schools will be profound and generational. Economists reviewed the loss of earnings from school disruptions during World War II in Austria and Germany. They found that missing a year of school means 9.4 percent to 16.2 percent lower earnings for up to 40 years, with bigger losses for children with less educated parents. More recent estimates from 139 countries indicate a year of schooling increases earnings by 9 percent. Even brief school closures, such as the 1916 polio pandemic, lowered levels of educational attainment.

The costs won’t be suffered uniformly. Online schooling is better than no school, but it’s hardly an improvement for many students. As in wartime Germany and Austria, better-educated parents can make up the difference by helping their children with online education and adding more homeschooling. Some parents will hire tutors, create learning pods, move to communities that offer in-person education, or find private schools that reopen. Children from low-income households, however, will pay the biggest cost. Indeed, the impact on low-income families will last for years, creating a level of inequality so large that even Bernie Sanders-style levels of taxation won’t fix it. And yet progressives, who normally obsess over inequality, respond by asking affluent parents to forgo educating their children, in an act of class solidarity.

Growing Wage Gap In Developed Economies, Not Just US: Skill Inequality From Workers' Education And Productivity Growth Differences Are Cause

From National Review, Capital Matters, The Economy, "Growing Wage Inequality Is Caused by Growing Skill Inequality" by Edward P. Lazear:

Is growing inequality the fault of capitalism, of a growing ability of American firms to exploit their workers, or of increasing greed? Both the international and domestic evidence is inconsistent with those explanations. In fact, the growing wage gap seen in the US is common to most developed economies. Top earners have enjoyed higher wage growth than the median worker throughout the OECD countries. A subset of institutionally and political diverse countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland, Switzerland, Australia, New Zealand and Canada among others, have all experienced growing wage inequality similar to that seen in the United States. If such varied countries — some of which are held out as examples of the social-democratic ideal — are all seeing growing wage dispersion, it is unlikely that capitalism, increased monopoly power, or growing greed is the cause.

If not capitalism per se, what is the explanation for growing wage inequality? The answer is increasing dispersion in labor-market productivity. In labor markets where firms must compete with one another to hire and retain workers, wages tend to reflect a worker’s productivity. The evidence supporting this linkage is strong. If wages at the bottom are not growing as rapidly as wages at the top, perhaps productivity among the least skilled workers is not growing as rapidly as productivity among the most skilled workers. In fact, that is exactly what appears to be happening.

Industries vary in their use of skilled workers. For example, in the Bureau of Labor Statistics’ “Apparel Manufacturing” industry, the average level of education is 11.7 years. In “Information Services and Data Processing Services,” it is 15.5 years. Those industries that have the most educated workers have the highest levels of productivity measured as total value added per hour worked. Those same industries also tend to have witnessed the greatest growth in productivity over the past two decades. In fact, the differences in productivity growth between educated and less-educated workers far outstrips the differences in wage growth between educated and less-educated workers. This evidence suggests that wages are lagging for the lowest half of American workers primarily because productivity growth is lagging for those workers.