"How would you determine that there are too many lawyers and software engineers when the market demands them?"
Results. With anything, whether money, resources, time or people, we can look at whether adding them has improved results, and if so by how much.
For example, health. Sanitation took life expectancy from 40 to 50. Vaccination and antibiotics each added 10 years, taking us to 70yo. Depending on which country you're talking about, that gives us another 10 years or so which fancier medicine can take credit for.
But this is confused by things like, here in Australia from 1970 to 2020 smoking went from 45% of all adults to 12%. Depending on the study, smoking takes something like 10 years off a person's life. So if 33% of the population start or stop, that's 3.3yr difference on average. Similarly with alcohol, where non-drinkers have gone from 15 to 45%.
So all the money spent on higher-level medicine has added something like 2-5 years of life. You can look at the per capita healthcare spending of your country over the last 20-30 years, and in most Western countries it's doubled - but with little or no improvement in life expectancy.
Now, you may or may not want to go as far as saying that the extra healthcare spending has been wasted - there's quality of life too, after all, and that can be harder to quantify. But it's plain that compared to the relatively cheap sanitation, vaccination and antibiotics, and the revenue neutral anti-smoking and anti-drinking stuff, higher medicine has much, much lower rates of return on the money, time, resource, effort and people spent on it.
You can do similar analyses on all sorts of sectors. Look at how the numbers of whatever profession have increased, then decide whether or how much it's improved people's lives.
You don't have to manage it. You just look at results. Make the results public. Then people will respond to that information, and things will manage themselves.
A free market only works when it's an informed free market. In many areas, however, information is deliberately kept obscure and difficult to find. For example, we know from studies that the patients of "leading" cardiologists have a higher mortality than those from resident cardiologists, even adjusted for patient condition - because the leading cardiologists are more likely to order a new intervention rather than wait to see if the old one works, and they're more likely to violate the clinical practice guidelines ("I wrote them!" No, he didn't, it was him and a bunch of others, and they exist for a reason).
If patients knew that their "leading" cardiologist was more likely to kill them, then they might be refuse the interventions, or seek out a resident cardiologist.
Likewise, if people know their building has a life expectancy shorter than their mortgage period, and so on.
If the information is freely available, people can make decisions based on it. There's no need for a commissar in an office somewhere to be making decisions for them.
People rely on the information conveyed via price signals in order to understand the job market requirement for lawyers and software engineers. This seems to work fine. I don’t believe there is any conspiracy to deliberately obfuscate the demand for employment in these areas.
There's no conspiracy. You don't need a conspiracy when interests converge. A person in a large bureaucratic organisation has an interest in having more underlings, it increases his status. And the underlings have an interest in getting hired. And once they do that, they can overwork the underlings and charge clients more. And so on.
Nor does government conspire to.make tax law more complex. But each MP wants to be re-elected, so they bring in a tax or exemption to a tax and a later alteration to the exemption, to.plese some segment of the electorate. And thus tax law becomes more complicated and lengthy, giving rise to the need for more tax lawyers and accountants.
No conspiracy - just everyone acting in their own interests to create bureaucratic bloat and pointless busywork.
It's “the market” in the same way that cancer is “nature”.
"How would you determine that there are too many lawyers and software engineers when the market demands them?"
Results. With anything, whether money, resources, time or people, we can look at whether adding them has improved results, and if so by how much.
For example, health. Sanitation took life expectancy from 40 to 50. Vaccination and antibiotics each added 10 years, taking us to 70yo. Depending on which country you're talking about, that gives us another 10 years or so which fancier medicine can take credit for.
But this is confused by things like, here in Australia from 1970 to 2020 smoking went from 45% of all adults to 12%. Depending on the study, smoking takes something like 10 years off a person's life. So if 33% of the population start or stop, that's 3.3yr difference on average. Similarly with alcohol, where non-drinkers have gone from 15 to 45%.
So all the money spent on higher-level medicine has added something like 2-5 years of life. You can look at the per capita healthcare spending of your country over the last 20-30 years, and in most Western countries it's doubled - but with little or no improvement in life expectancy.
Now, you may or may not want to go as far as saying that the extra healthcare spending has been wasted - there's quality of life too, after all, and that can be harder to quantify. But it's plain that compared to the relatively cheap sanitation, vaccination and antibiotics, and the revenue neutral anti-smoking and anti-drinking stuff, higher medicine has much, much lower rates of return on the money, time, resource, effort and people spent on it.
You can do similar analyses on all sorts of sectors. Look at how the numbers of whatever profession have increased, then decide whether or how much it's improved people's lives.
I don’t believe you can manage an economy according to results- command economics fails in practice.
You don't have to manage it. You just look at results. Make the results public. Then people will respond to that information, and things will manage themselves.
A free market only works when it's an informed free market. In many areas, however, information is deliberately kept obscure and difficult to find. For example, we know from studies that the patients of "leading" cardiologists have a higher mortality than those from resident cardiologists, even adjusted for patient condition - because the leading cardiologists are more likely to order a new intervention rather than wait to see if the old one works, and they're more likely to violate the clinical practice guidelines ("I wrote them!" No, he didn't, it was him and a bunch of others, and they exist for a reason).
If patients knew that their "leading" cardiologist was more likely to kill them, then they might be refuse the interventions, or seek out a resident cardiologist.
Likewise, if people know their building has a life expectancy shorter than their mortgage period, and so on.
If the information is freely available, people can make decisions based on it. There's no need for a commissar in an office somewhere to be making decisions for them.
Transparency.
People rely on the information conveyed via price signals in order to understand the job market requirement for lawyers and software engineers. This seems to work fine. I don’t believe there is any conspiracy to deliberately obfuscate the demand for employment in these areas.
But it's a self-sustaining system.
There's no conspiracy. You don't need a conspiracy when interests converge. A person in a large bureaucratic organisation has an interest in having more underlings, it increases his status. And the underlings have an interest in getting hired. And once they do that, they can overwork the underlings and charge clients more. And so on.
Nor does government conspire to.make tax law more complex. But each MP wants to be re-elected, so they bring in a tax or exemption to a tax and a later alteration to the exemption, to.plese some segment of the electorate. And thus tax law becomes more complicated and lengthy, giving rise to the need for more tax lawyers and accountants.
No conspiracy - just everyone acting in their own interests to create bureaucratic bloat and pointless busywork.
It's “the market” in the same way that cancer is “nature”.
See Parkinson's Laws.