Professional intermediaries are as a cost on real production, so it makes sense to try to manage with as few of them as possible.

The image shows the growth in the number of solicitors in England and Wales since 1981, adjusted for increases in the population. Most of these are commercial lawyers working on business or property deals. (There is still a shortage of lawyers in the criminal law system.) The blue circles show the number of solicitors in 1981: about 40,000, or eight per ten thousand people. The red circles show the number in 2022, a total of 157,000 or twenty-six per ten thousand people - over three times as many.

The legal profession is far from unique in this. Similar figures apply to accountants, management consultants, and many other financial and business services. The number of commercial solicitors, however, and the volume of transactional activity they administer, serve as a bellwether for an economic system in which the opportunities for wealth accumulation have far outpaced the growth in the real wealth being produced.

Lawyers patrol and regulate the interface between primary producers and end consumers. The huge increase in their numbers in recent decades shows how that space has widened to accommodate more and more intermediaries, all dependent on extracting and accumulating a part of the value that those primary producers create.

This is not to say that lawyers, accountants, managers and other intermediaries are unnecessary in a complex social and economic system. Clearly they have their place. But since they operate as a cost on real production, since they extract their share of wealth rather than creating it from new, it makes sense to try to manage with as few of them as possible. That way there will be more work-time and resources available to apply directly to improving the quality of people’s lives.