The overqualified part definitely applies, since they assume that you'll quit as soon as something better opens up. Which, to be fair, is usually true.

Oh I hadn't really thought of that part, but that's a very good point.

I had imagined they'd assume you'd be gunning for a raise in short order or they might not enjoy having an admin assistant who is quite possibly more intelligent than themselves.

On a more "ideal" note, they may also not want someone with a Master's because they feel that their expertise would be more useful elsewhere and that their talent would be wasted in a secretarial role.

Editing and journalism are still very necessary, but somehow the actual streams of monetary income for them have almost entirely dried up.

The result is that we get very little independent (of state funding) journalism, and what we do get from any sources is very badly edited. But somehow there's no need being expressed on the market for journalists or editors?

Sounds like a market failure to me.

It is a market failure if people want to sell editing and people want to buy editing and no transactions take place. If no one wants to buy editing, no sales of editing is a market success. For example, it informs people wondering if they should learn editing or nursing that nursing is the socially and personally optimal choice. One could argue gl that government subsidies for editing misinform participants about what society wants and, simultaneously, redirect societal resources from things people want to things they do not want, like editing.

Actually, market failure is when the allocation of goods and services by a free market is not Pareto optimal. That is, there exists another conceivable outcome where a market participant may be made better-off without making someone else worse-off.

This is entirely possible in situations when nobody wants to buy X and nobody is buying X. One common example is when there are externalities involved -- e.g. companies using highly polluting processes that are bourne by not just the customers but also uninvolved 3rd parties. Another common example is due to informational gaps -- imagine a benign physician selling polio vaccinations to a less educated populace that doesn't want them. No one wants to buy, but no sales of vaccinations is very far from Pareto optimal.

It is well recognized that non-competitive markets and principal–agent problems can also lead to market failure and there is probably a case to be made that the supply side of high-end journalism suffers from both.

Good point. It's not a market failure, it's a market idiocy. People don't want to buy editing or journalism, they just want regular newspapers and well-edited books to somehow appear for them without having to pay anyone.