Not sure where statistia gets its sources, but there are roughly 500 philosophy phds awarded a year http://dailynous.com/2017/08/28/slight-increase-philosophy-p

Not sure where statistia gets its sources, but there are roughly 500 philosophy phds awarded a year http://dailynous.com/2017/08/28/slight-increase-philosophy-phds-awarded-humanities-data/ http://dailynous.com/2017/08/28/slight-increase-philosophy-p... And roughly 2000 in math. http://www.ams.org/profession/data/annual-survey/phds-awarded http://www.ams.org/profession/data/annual-survey/phds-awarde... >The government has a variety of avenues to promote research in specific fields: by employing those researchers directly, by funding research universities, by issuing grants to researchers engaged in research. I feel these might be better at obtaining public policy goals, while being much less susceptible to rent-seeking. It's surprisingly difficult to engage in pure research with government grants, believe it or not. In certain fields, like philosophy and math, just covering health insurance and providing lunch money might be much more effective.