Proliferation of lawyers

Nature

The number of lawyers is increasing in capitalist societies due to the promise of very high incomes and advantages for those who work with wealth and can understand manipulate the growing complexity of rules.

Incidence

In 1951 in the USA there were 221,000 lawyers, or one for every 695 citizens. By 1989 there were 725,000 lawyers, or one for every 343 people.

Claim

High salaries are drawing more of the best students into occupations, like lawyering, investment banking and financial consulting, that do not add to future wealth but rather only tend and distribute the old. Fewer are left to be tomorrow's top engineers, factory managers, linguists or teachers.