My friend @lesterleung posted a link to this really interesting report by Medscape on physician compensation in the USA.

The whole set of slides is pretty interesting, but I was curious in particular how much career satisfaction correlated with salary, at least if you broke physicians up into different specialties. I plotted each specialty’s average response to “if you had to do it all over again, would you choose your own specialty again?” against their average salary in 2012. The line of best fit isn’t too bad:

Mean 2012 salary does a half-decent job explaining a chunk of the variation in specialty self-satisfaction.