We often criticize the excessive number of students in the humanities. And rightly so. The numbers studying political science and related fields are indefensible. We see them marching in anti-national demonstrations, and we fear—again, not without cause—that we will support them for the rest of their lives. We encounter dissertations on “Gender Aspects of the Ant Ferda,” and the complaint seems justified.
Yet Dan Wang, in his book Breakneck, offers statistics that cast this in a different light. Comparing enrollments in China and the West, he shows that while China does indeed produce vastly more engineers (even after accounting for population size), it also trains proportionally more sociologists, psychologists, and above all historians.
The real intellectual proletariat of the West consists not of anthropologists or sociologists but of lawyers and professional managers. In these fields, our numbers are many times those of China. Only when I saw the data did I realize how many trained lawyers I know—brilliant, competent people—who nevertheless scrape by in fierce competition, or who cannot practice law at all. And it is striking that politics and the nonprofit world are flooded with lawyers to a degree far exceeding the presence of anthropologists, psychologists, or even gender-studies graduates. The problem is not the handful of eccentric disciplines—it is the oversupply of ambitious, credentialed professionals without sufficient outlets.
And by “managers” I do not mean the chemist who, after years in a laboratory, takes courses in management in order to run a chemical plant. I mean the professional managers of anything and everything, mass-produced by business schools. China has little use for them. Europe, a generation ago, had little use for them. Today, they are among the most common of specializations.
It is worth noting: Western governments are dominated by lawyers. China’s government, by contrast, is heavily staffed by historians, political scientists, and other humanists. The difference is that in China, these studies are still conducted with rigor, not frivolity.