[sudhirj]

Not quite the way I'm reading it. It's a variation on "if everyone wants to be a leader, who's going to follow" line. If the entire population wants to be doctors, we already know that's not going to work. And if everyone finds out they can't be a doctor after 10 years of medical school, where the amount of time and money spent has now created a sense of entitlement to the life of a doctor, the people are going to be pretty pissed off when you ask them to be fruit pickers or sanitation workers instead. Same goes for lawyers, engineers or any other profession that has a supply-demand imbalance.

[inglor_cz]

Oversupply of lawyers seems to be a better example.

Lots of lawyers in the legislative, constantly creating new laws that drive need for more lawyers ... but of course up to a point, and some of the graduates will find they cannot pass the bar exam or progress towards the coveted positions.

Suddenly you have some very unhappy people who know enough about the law to do some real harm to the system out of spite.

[spaetzleesser]

"Lots of lawyers in the legislative, constantly creating new laws that drive need for more lawyers"

Totally agree. I think laws would be quite different if the majority of lawmakers weren't lawyers. A lot of law seems to be designed to only be navigated by lawyers.

[whoisburbansky]

Is it better to have an undersupply of doctors leading to overworked doctors and generally worse medical outcomes or to have an oversupply, with some of the excess going on to do, e.g. research or administration? Exactly matching supply and demand is practically impossible, so which side is it safer to err on?

[wcunning]

It's obviously better to have a, say, 1% oversupply than a 1% undersupply, but that's not an interesting question to answer, really. The better question would be: is it better to have a 1% undersupply than a 15% oversupply? (Or some other larger and less obvious mismatch) It would be clearly bad to paperclip-optimize doctors -- everyone must go through all 10 years of post-secondary education to be a doctor and then after they have done so, we will be pick the best 3% of them to be practicing doctors while telling everyone else to find another career is incredibly wasteful, as is anything significantly in that vein.

[nradov]

It's rather meaningless to talk about oversupply or undersupply of doctors. Demand for healthcare services is effectively infinite. The problem is that we burn up most healthcare resources on treating preventable chronic diseases, and on futile end-of-life care.

Rather than on supplying more doctors we would probably get better results for society as a whole with more dieticians, personal trainers, and substance abuse counselors.

[mywittyname]

An important consideration is that those doctors could have been something else.

If you buy into the notion that intelligence follows a normal distribution, and that people below some threshold are fundamentally locked out of professions, then it becomes important how society allocates that top x% of intelligent people, because they are in short supply.

A society that underproduces physicists in favor of doctors might find their economy is unable to grow rapidly enough to pay for the hospitals those doctors need to operate in. One that overproduces amazing musicians might find that their cultural influence helps to attract smart people from other countries.

We see this issue in America too. Where hedge funds are paying extremely intelligent people tens of millions of dollars annually to program computers that essentially play games in the stock market with the programs written by other hedge funds. That isn't exactly the kind of behavior that will lead to the technological improvements our society will need to continue to grow.

[caf]

Where hedge funds are paying extremely intelligent people tens of millions of dollars annually to program computers that essentially play games in the stock market with the programs written by other hedge funds.

This seems overly reductionist. A case can be made that these games are overall working to optimise the allocation of resources, which itself contributes to growth.

[mywittyname]

Yeah, these people might be ensuring more optimal prices for corn, and maybe that's a good thing. But in doing that, they aren't doing something else which may be more important for society.

My point was that very smart people are a finite resource. And misallocating them can have devastating effects on a society.

[captainoats]

How each person assigns value to different professions is entirely subjective. Almost every industry has its own bell curve, the market determines how tall/shifted each is.

[spaetzleesser]

"if everyone wants to be a leader, who's going to follow"

I see that a lot with our interns. A lot of them are trained and motivated to "lead", "facilitate" and "collaborate" but not so much about doing actual work.

But it's no wonder when you look at the way things work in most companies. Managers make way more money than non-managers. And a lot of managers didn't cut it as software engineers so they got pushed into management where they suck too but make good money.

[native_samples]

This culture is heavily promoted by management consultancies, who seem to think nothing of sending a 24 year old "consultant" into large corporations to tell them how to run their business.