> Except you have no idea a priori who will succeed and who won’t. Not really relevant. We're not talking about the general concept of "success", we're talkin

> Except you have no idea a priori who will succeed and who won’t. Not really relevant. We're not talking about the general concept of "success", we're talking about if the market for some profession or academic pursuit can support a certain number of people entering it. That's something that you can predict reasonably well. Not perfectly, and there can certainly be outlier events that drastically change things unexpectedly. But it's possible to have reasonably accurate forecasting here. As for "success", sure, it's hard to tell if any individual who wants to enter a particular field will do it well enough to be successful. Admissions departments at universities can sometimes do an ok job predicting that, but they often end up being wrong (in both directions). That's just life. The medical profession is of course doing those forecasts and then artificially restricting things further, in order to maintain high salaries and high prestige. I don't think we'd be having this argument if they weren't so greedy and set limits at reasonable levels such that we had enough doctors and specialists out there to handle patients promptly and effectively.