This is a common problem in many commodity markets. If creating new supply is inexpensive, and all market participants have functionally equivalent technology

This is a common problem in many commodity markets. If creating new supply is inexpensive, and all market participants have functionally equivalent technology and operational expertise. New supply will always emerge to eat away any margin that a market participant may have. (Think Restaurants, farming, small-time delivery/construction, uber driving) If you follow this through to the extreme you end up with a vicious cycle of boom/bust where any demand opportunity that emerges is crushed under 10x the supply increase. The market becomes unstable as new participants have clean balance sheets and older participants go into debt that cannot be paid. Supply is only maintained through the addition of new market participants willing to lose their capital or burn their balance sheet on debt in a private parallel to the tragedy of the commons. One traditional solution that keeps these markets stable, and market participants from simply bankrupting every few years is to introduce an artificial supply cap. In construction, and small business markets this task is often performed by the zoning board, or a local licensing board. In the case of larger markets participants may form cartels such as in OPEC, Maple Syrup, or international shipping. In the case of science, the task of supply control traditional fell on admissions committees and the availability of permanent tenure tracked professorships. This mechanism broke down with the introduction of non-tenure track positions, and the external funding of grad-students. Universities now have every incentive to flood the market with vastly more scientists than can reasonably be funded - which combined with the inherent riskiness of scientific research means we have a combination of science "bankruptcies" and low-risk, low-quality academic research to show for it. I'd much rather see fewer tenured professors ridiculed for their oddball research than an army of post-docs and grad students performing meaningless research which is suitable for publishing.