Thanks for clarifying, I understand your position a lot better. I no longer find it circular, but I still disagree with a lot of your assumptions. TL;DR: I (

Thanks for clarifying, I understand your position a lot better. I no longer find it circular, but I still disagree with a lot of your assumptions. TL;DR: I (and IMO this thread) was speaking of hard sciences, not social sciences: there doesn't seem to be nearly as much of a replicability issue due to people starving for discoveries (there are still process improvements to be made, however). As such, the only bottleneck I've seen evidence of (in the hard sciences) is funding. I do of course think it's possible to fund science _too_ well, I just think that what evidence there is doesn't imply that we're on the point on the curve where excess funding is the problem. The "oversupply" in hard sciences is only relative to the choked-off funding, not to any reality-grounded assessment of the value of further research (and researchers). I did think the social sciences would come up and considered clarifying that I was speaking exclusively of the hard sciences; I assumed from the conversation about "science careers" that we weren't talking about the majority of the social sciences (I don't think sociology/economics/etc are commonly held to be "science careers"). When you're saying that 1/4 of the economy would be necessary, I'm not sure if you're basing that on the situation where every schoolchild thinks they need to go to grad school? Frankly, I don't think this assumption is reasonable: I don't think the current system even encourages that. Universal undergrad is heavily encouraged, but culturally, grad school still remains very much discretionary. Hell, the last three generations of my family have been thick with advanced degrees on both sides, and I still didn't end up getting one (though it's certainly possible in the future).