Are there too many of us?

By "us" I mean graduate students in political theory. Here's your "gloomy reading of the week" link, to an article arguing that there is a "glut" of PhDs, especially in disciplines which produce graduates without many skills marketable to industry (reading ancient Greek, writing papers on Hegel, you get the picture). (More discussion after the break).

Of course, taking our cue from Plato (self-promoting link(PDF) to my reading of the section on measure), to say that there is "too much" of anything one needs to ask: too much for what?

The economist's answer to that question says: too much (or too many) at some price X for the current structure of desires of society. Given that price, there are unsold products, or unemployment or underemployment, or the equivalent term in other markets. So, an economist might say that there are too many PhD students for the number of positions available at the salaries currently paid and given the kind of investment it takes to get a PhD, since many PhDs end up unemployed or underemployed.

There is something to that. As those of us who are currently in the labor market can attest, the number of people applying to even obscure positions is huge. One position I applied to had 400 applications; another had 630 (needless to say, it is very hard to reach "rational" decisions when choosing the "best" candidate out of 630). These are numbers one would expect to find for unskilled labor, not for positions requiring highly specialized knowledge that requires lots of time and money (in the form of foregone income opportunities) to attain. We may all eventually find a position (though perhaps not at the level we wanted to, and perhaps at a much lower income than we expected to), but it certainly does not seem a very "rational" economic decision on our part to spend so much time and energy preparing to become professors.

True, most of us did not go to graduate school for the money - we did it to follow our intellectual passions, or because we had nothing else to do, or whatever; but the economic point would still hold, and the article I linked to details some of possible perverse incentives that universities have to train as many PhD students as they can. (Why, exactly, did I go into political theory? Sometimes I can't remember).

But the economist's viewpoint is not the only possible one. Are there too many students of political theory from another point of view? Does society need - as a matter of some conception of he common good - the number of political theorists-in-training that currently exist? E.g., from the point of view of the production of knowledge, or of teaching young people? Can one justify not one's own work, but the work of a group of heterogeneous individuals in anything other than economic terms? (The market values your work at X).

[Update: I've changed this post a bit after putting it up, February 5, 2006]