The big question is how should the government allocate the funding for basic research between career stages to maximize the benefit to the society.
If you focus on training PhDs, which is the American way, you get a steady stream of new people with fresh ideas. But then most PhDs must leave the academia after graduating.
If you focus on postdocs, you get more value from the PhDs you have trained. Most will still have to leave the academia, but it happens in a later career stage.
If you focus on long-term jobs, you have more experienced researchers working on longer-term projects. But then you are stuck with the people you chose before you had a good idea of their ability to contribute.
We aren't really. We are guiding people to get college degrees. However, undergraduate education and professional research are both done by the same institution. Further, that institution likes to have those professional and apprentice professional researchers work as teachers. The result of this is that undergraduates get a lot of exposure to professional Academia, so they naturally have a tendency to develop an interest in that profession. Given how small the profession actually is, even a small tendency here saturates the job market.
At this point, what profession isn't "small"? It feels like jobs are declining across all industries except for the most exploitative ones they can't easily outsource.
You can also get a job in the private sector after a PhD. It's not necessarily a waste of time for those we don't get to work in Academia.
Honest question. If the job market is that competitive, why are we guiding people down this path that requires investing their entire young adult life? To me, it seems you've inadvertently made a case for cutting funding.