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I found it darkly amusing to learn that within the offices of the American Historical Association their graph of job ads vs. PhDs is known as the "Graph of Doom." https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history/march-2018/townhouse-notes-march-2018 …pic.twitter.com/VlLEP20BVF
While I take their point that it does not perfectly represent "the market" or possible job outcomes for PhDs in History, I think retiring it is a TERRIBLE idea. It is is still an important representation of the state of academic jobs and production of PhDs, even if not perfect.
To put it another way: I think not reporting this data would be a worse misrepresentation than reporting it, in particular for people thinking of getting a History PhD today. All representations are inadequate; all trends can change; but this does give a sense of the big picture.
In some ways I think things are harder than it indicates. In our last job search, we had about 130 candidates for a single TT job. The same year there were a total of 13 such jobs in our subfield announced that I saw. That's a pretty nasty ratio.
To be sure, not all people with History PhDs want TT jobs. But at least 130 of them appeared to, in my field, and those jobs are few and far between. And I will say that in that 130 there were many AMAZING candidates. It was an AGONIZING choice for the committee.
As an aside — I have long remembered (and even recited!) Max Weber's quote, "Academic life is a mad hazard." But I forgot the rest of the passage, and the message he directed towards Jewish scholars in particular: "Lasciate ogni speranza" — "Abandon all hope." 
pic.twitter.com/8IlXT0L9Xo
(For context, he wrote this in 1918 about the situation in Germany, and is specifically referring to the situation of young Jewish scholars in interwar Germany.)
I. So from a layman's perspective, my question would be: What does this really represent? An overall drop in demand for History PhDs because there's less demand for the subject? A glut in supply due to overproduction? What do you think is causing that gap?
The first 2009 drop is because universities got conservative in their finances and a lot of job lines, even whole departments/programs, disappeared. At the time this was very apparent — a lot of tenure-track jobs suddenly turned into short-term fellowships, for example.
The more interesting question is why the market started to recover and crash again. Previous analysis by AHA has indicated that this may be because of demographic changes wrought by the reaction to the 2008 crash.
One strategy universities used to decrease their costs was to encourage many faculty to embrace early retirement (buy outs). This is because senior faculty cost much more $$ per year than junior ones. But apparently that has significantly decreased the age of the profession.
By knocking the mean age down a decade or so, it means the number of retirements per year has dropped quite a bit. Which means new lines aren't opening up as quickly. Other economic rearrangements seem to imply that lines aren't always being re-filled even if they do open up.
In the meantime, the number of PhDs seems to just go up. Keep in mind there is a 6-8 year "lag" in people starting grad school and finishing it in history. But even with the bad market, people seem to be signing up, staying in programs, etc.
That does produce a kind of "overproduction" of the market, IF you assume those people are trying to get tenure-track academic jobs. (In my anecdotal experience, most of them do aspire to that, though most give some bitter acknowledgment of the probability it won't happen.)
Grad programs are incentivized to keep their rosters full because at most universities grad students are absolutely essential as a cheap labor force (in history that is mostly for teaching, in the sciences it is for research, etc.).
This is is the primary reason I didn't pursue. It's also worth noting that this problem will breed a monoculture within the field by only selecting the "elite." Could be an era devoid of original thinking
There are definite epistemological impacts of job swings — Dave Kaiser at MIT has written on this in Physics in particular, and has also applied the methodology to other fields as well: http://web.mit.edu/dikaiser/www/CWB.html …
I think the exact epistemological impacts can be hard to predict. Will it cause people to be more conservative, or will they work to differentiate themselves? In my graduate cohort, I have seen both reactions (I fell into the latter category myself, which luckily worked out).
The separate issue (and perhaps what you were referring to and I was just being dense), is who decides to go down this perilous route. And I do think that's an issue. If the economic hazards are high, you will only get people who come from great economic privilege.
And that definitely has its own epistemological impacts as well, though again I think it is not a totally straightforward thing.
Interesting graph - do the job adds only include positions in the USA? Only jobs advertised in the AHA magazine?
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