the abstraction of markets and the willingness to find excuses

Richard D. Wolff says that economists use markets as an excuse. A "market" is an abstraction, but it comes into being as a result of the action of individuals.....

Philosophers use the market as an excuse when they tell potential students: the market is bad.

That's code for:  you may not (probably won't) get a job, and there's nothing we can do about it.

Well, once upon a time, that's how I took it, when as a twenty-year old, I got a letter admitting me to a Ph.D. program in P|hilosophy, and warning me about the bad market.

Maybe the letter didn't actually use the word "market"; it doesn't matter.  That's a word that philosophers do use.

Is there anything they might do to change things?  Could they attempt to influence the direction of public education?  Surely they could have, and surely they did not.  (Like a good capitalist, I judge by results; and lately the result has been for many years that public education in the USA is in decline.)

And why wouldn't they do something like that?  Political action would distract from the research they enjoy and which gains them rewards in our capitalist society................

And what do I think about that?  Well, I don't have such a high opinion of philosophers as I used to.  They seem like very ordinary conformists who keep their heads low, and do nothing out of the ordinary......In that respect, really very average and ordinary.......and not especially admirable..........but also powerless and acquiescent...............

After -thoughts: And what about me?  I've done nothing particularly political in my life.  I am reminded of the dissident who remarked that most people weren't dissidents, and that is to be expected.  But when I think of my youthful self, that letter was damaging.  And, it was especially damaging because I was in no position to understand it.  And today I do think that a letter like that is, at best, morally ambiguous.   Here's a young person who's actually quite ignorant of the class structure in the USA.  Here's a young person who actually understands very little about how the world works--and he (I, in my youth) is in no position to understand that letter---except as a slap
in the face.  ("Yeah you can get a Ph.D., but when it's done, you wont get a job............ So,how can you commit yourself fully to that?)
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Put this all differently:  Why are there such limits?  Why are there few jobs teaching Philosophy?
Because Philosophy contributes less to human beings than Banking?  --That was a joke.
There's no good reason why there shouldn't be more jobs teaching philosophy, and more chances for people to learn philosophy.  None at all.  There is no mythological market that decreed that we have too many Philosophy Ph.D.'s.....

But that letter, in effect, evoked the myth of the market...............