All economics is just footnotes to Adam Smith - or wrong

Adam Smith goes to great lengths to point out that - other things like amount of capital, level of technology etc being equal - the jobs people enjoy doing more pay less cash money than the jobs people enjoy doing less:

The whole of the advantages and disadvantages of the different employments of labour and stock must, in the same neighbourhood, be either perfectly equal or continually tending to equality. If in the same neighbourhood, there was any employment evidently either more or less advantageous than the rest, so many people would crowd into it in the one case, and so many would desert it in the other, that its advantages would soon return to the level of other employments. This at least would be the case in a society where things were left to follow their natural course, where there was perfect liberty, and where every man was perfectly free both to chuse what occupation he thought proper, and to change it as often as he thought proper. Every man’s interest would prompt him to seek the advantageous, and to shun the disadvantageous employment.

As ever, many pages of 18th century prose to explain further.

In the newspaper:

I earn around £50,000. It’s a good salary and I have a comfortable life but I don’t think vets are well paid when you consider the amount of training we go through, the cost of that training, the hours we work, the stress and dedication that goes into the job – particularly when you compare us to similar professions such as dentists and doctors who can expect a much larger salary.

What bothers me the most is the public’s misconception of how well we are paid. I think a lot of people think vets are paid more than we are. If I told certain friends and family what I am paid, they would be shocked.

Sometimes angry clients will say, “you’re only in it for the money, you don’t care about my animal,” and that is a hurtful comment. Veterinary teams are made up of highly qualified and intelligent people and if we wanted to earn more money, we would be doing something else. We are all in it because we love animals and we really care about pet owners.

This is, of course, one of those footnotes to Smith.

The total pay for a job is the compensation and doing something you love - as we here know very well - is one of those compensations of a job.