It's an interesting choice though. Wealth of parents is not a fair metric. But on the other hand, letting the demand-side have its pick of the lot and leaving the chaff to rot is wasteful and cruel.

I got to thinking about this a while back when learning about Patton. You could say he was born to be a general- a wealthy, military family, extensive military education. Most of the rest of the world, from the moment he was born, never had a chance to be what he was. But you can't give that lifetime of military education and training to everybody, and isn't that OK? You might like to be fair and give everyone the same chance, and maybe there's a guy out there who would have been even better with the same opportunity, but can we afford to do that?

It's a similar story with racing drivers and many athletes.

Edit: It occurs to me one can point to the failure of communism to determine how many potatoes should be grown, as a reason why we should not try to predict the number of professors that will be needed. I'm not sure where to go from here. Perhaps the next question is, have we gotten in the way of the invisible hand, the traditional savior from this kind of problem? If so, what next?