Yay numbers. Yay jobs?
This weekend I rediscovered the Bureau of Labor Statistics website. Large bureaucracies may not always be the most efficient or practical organizations in the world, but you can’t beat them for massive amounts of data (see also BEA or BLM or, my favorite for voting research, the USCB). Oooh! Look at all those numbers!
So I decided to research some of the jobs I was musing about below. It turns out that only one of them is real job. Oh well. The BLS has all you wanna know about being an EMT.
They tell you about the work, the lifestyle, the requirements, who’ll hire you, what they’ll pay, and more. If that isn’t enough for you, check out the Employment Statistics. Now you have wages broken down by industry sector or geography. Did you know that Wisconsin has the highest number of EMTs per capita? And if that still doesn’t satisfy your thirst for numbers, you can get the excel files.
Unfortunately none of these distinguish between EMT Basics (me) and Paramedics (not me), so the fact that one location has a higher median salary (e.g. D.C.) may just mean they employ a higher percentage of Paramedics (which is true for D.C.). More usefully, it tells you that Firefighters earn more.