An oversupply of PhDs or our capitalist system not aligning in a way to advance us in ways that don't model a ROI in three years or less?
Look at what capitalism has done to standards of living and life expectancy across the world over the last 100 years. In terms of the quality of human life, it is so staggering how effective capitalism has been. I think your view point of certain people being disadvantaged with regards to our current form of capitalism is short sighted. Sure, some physics phd may not be fully utilized, but that is at the cost of a system that is changing the world for the better.
What we are arguing is whether forcefully changing the inefficiencies (how do we even know they are inefficiencies? We dont. We can only speculate) you see in capitalism would help society overall. But that is like saying in the course of human evolution, we need to enforce mating rules to "change the course", sure we could do that, but how impossible is it? Would it even help? Are we even smart enough to figure that out?
I look at the characteristics of capitalism across two different zones of operation. One a sort of pre-industrial/pre-buildout phase and the other a post-buildout phase. The performance was great in pre-buildout where it's pretty easy to direct just about any additional economic activity to creating new value. So just about any activity that increase profits - increases general well being in the region.
But for nations in the post-buildout it's pretty sketchy, mostly more and more capital allocation going to momentum activity (three years of provable ROI...) instead of fundamental value creation. Increased profits don't necessarily spread out to general well being.
Nations like China, and many African nations, etc are in the earlier phase and it is certainly improving human quality of life in those kinds of regions - but other nations in post-buildout it's a very mixed bag where fundamental improvements are flat or even reversing. China is arguably in the middle of build out and may have another decade or two to go where current capitalistic tools work well for it. Africa is even earlier on that curve - but the US is definitely in the post phase.
I'm not even advocating any specific change - just observing that there's a big difference in the effects of economic activity in the two phases. And that the US in the second phase is really not delivering quality of life improvements to society at large in the same way as earlier. If one agrees with my observations though - it is easy to think that some sort of change is warranted.