[MonMay12]

There's no oversupply, it's decreasing numbers of "preferable" jobs (i.e. tenured professorships) which at least some people previously preferred to industry, inefficient boom-bust cycles in industry, and bad systems for matching work and people. Local minima and kinetic traps are also well-known to exist within the physical sciences, but apparently when we turn to studying societies, we lose this concept and decide that if MBAs exist, we should consider why rather than also whether they are this point preferable to other managers. I say this as a scientist who thinks a lot of my colleagues are intellectually less capable than I expected going in, who is also often shocked by my own stupidity. Scientists who do not make a dramatic impact are also still an integral part of science, Kuhn's ideas come to mind here. By definition, not everyone can be a top-tier researcher.

It will take you 5 minutes to compile (1) Table 1-1 from https://ncses.nsf.gov/surveys/earned-doctorates/2023 and (2) https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d16/tables/dt16_101.10.a... to see that we produce science PhDs at the same rate we have for decades when normalizing for population. From there, I guess it comes down to considerations of whether the amount of scientific and engineering work as a proportion of total work modern societies need and/or do is going down or not, then whether we expect it should scale with population and/or societal advancement.

Considering the growing complexity of technology, number of productive fields, incoming crises our species faces while we simultaneously turn to more ambitious goals, and the amount of international students doing PhDs, one might actually think we underproduce scientists. Far, far, far more MBAs graduate every year than PhDs.

[YouWhy]

Thank you, that's a well stated and thorough critique.

A lot of your reaction is towards the notion of dramatic impact. Note that I tend to distinguish between an "intellectually capable" researcher and a "right stuff" researcher, which involves the ability to manage risks in self-led multi-year high-risk high-impact programs.

My icons are Katalin Karikó and James P. Allison, who are not necessarily the brightest people of their fields, and subpar at politics, but are actually very good at making impact (duh).

Circling back to the original thesis, setting up a Bell Labs necessitates spotting out the Karikós and Allisons out of a very large flock of (at best) diligent followers of current academic fashions or (worse) popularity contest winners, and I reckon that's not practically possible today.