The paradox is this is at a time when the population has never been more numerous and the economy more prosperous. There should be more specialists in all kinds of areas, not fewer. Instead capitalism is reducing people's horizons and impoverishing their choices of vocation and lifestyle, destroying the landbase while simultaneously driving the people that try to maintain the landbase and natural systems out of work, and in many cases into prison slave labor. It is a self-destructive cycle steering us into civilizational collapse.
I would be surprised if we had fewer specialists, either in absolute numbers or in relative numbers. The fields of specialization might have changed over time. Maybe many people who would've become botanists a hundred years ago now are geneticists or something like that.
