NEWLY QUALIFIED doctors in Britain have plenty to gripe about. A shortage of funding in general practice has left some of them working as taxi drivers. The doctors’ union, the British Medical Association (BMA), is voting on whether to strike over pay. One frustration is particularly intense: the sense of being treated as expendable by the system they’re meant to serve. Nowhere is that more evident than in the way new doctors are assigned their first jobs—a process that has also managed to make usually mild-mannered economists mad.