Free enough. Especially in large enough countries the market is free enough. There is no such thing as a completely free market. But in general, and in most places, no, most employers can't conspire to dump wages. Even if it looks like conspiracy, it may be something else, like a bidding war on the supply side.
At a rate of $5 or more they may be competing with higher skilled jobs in that country (I haven't checked, but four times the average wage...). Doctors and teachers would quit their jobs to earn this much.
That is what's happening in Cuba where highly skilled people with good English skills rather work in tourism than as doctors, engineers or teachers. Not a good long-term situation.
We're talking about African economies. Those businesses don't have margins that would allow a five times higher wage while still making profits.
Big tech companies, maybe. But even those.
Once you raise prices the demand shrinks which also leads to smaller profits. There's no free lunch. If employers could make more money by paying higher wages, they generally would.
Look for "Nash equilibrium". Game theory makes it really hard for all companies in a free market to conspire to keep wages down. Can they conspire to a small degree? Certainly, probably disguised as a cultural or traditional bias.
Employers don't pay $5 per hour because they wouldn't make a profit either.
Odds are, I have studied the topic of learning techniques to a much deeper degree than you are. I also studied veterinary medicine. Therefor I can say: Yes, surgeons will know most of what they know from reading books or consuming learning materials, not from practicing. Some surgeons might disagree, but this really is the case.
And you would want to be operated on by surgeons who are trained that way. Especially in Human medicine, "practice" is just too damn expensive. And routine surgical tasks just don't teach you all the shit that go wrong. Also, surgical procedures, especially when you consider all their variations or complications, have a long tail problem. Some things are just really rare.
There is a reason why surgeries are performed by doctors, and not by nurses. Doctors have so much knowledge and information in their head - most of it not acquired through practice, contrary to romantic belief, but rather through long hours over years of studying. We often need to "debug" a living organism. But we can't say "hm, let's run this again".
If the book is on surgical techniques... do I need to apply every technique to remember it?
Obviously, "applying" book knowledge is one of the least efficient or practicable way of improving retention. Also, it would be more around understanding the topics more thoroughly, especially if the author didn't do a good enough job of explaining the concepts already (it's easier to blame the reader, though).
Actually, by now I think "consuming information" does actually mean "acquiring knowledge".
And there is very little we can do to improve or degrade the retention of anything we actually "consume". Especially once you factor in consuming it again, which is almost always necessary for high retention.
No, actually, faster reading often helps with better retention.
Also, taking notes, marking up a text etc are in my opinion a waste of time. If the author did his job right you should be marking up 100% of the words, and when taking notes you should be copying the book almost verbatim.
If you absolutely need to have a high recall, I recommend to start with a recital based approach. Read a section, then try to recite the topic freely. This works well for complicated or information-dense stuff. Less well for fluffy prose. If you want to go a step further, use loci-method with the latter approach.
Also, being interested in more effective learning techniques is highly correlated with diagnosed/undiagnosed ADHD. Just sayin'
Otherwise you can only struggle to add as little dirt as possible.