What did a good academic job market for mathematicians look like and could it ever come back? I'm about to enter a math PhD program at a pretty good school, but the job market for research university professors has been terrible as far as I can remember (since the late 2000s recession). I hear many stories of hundreds of excellent candidates applying for one or two openings. 

Older professors tell me it wasn't always like this. What did the market look like when it was considered "good" and could it ever come back by the time I finish in 5-6 years? Or has there been a fundamental shift in academia preventing the good times as we knew it from ever returning?
First, some historical perspective: Francis Sowerby Macaulay and Hermann Schubert, two mathematicians from the late 19th century whose names you still hear repeatedly these days if you come anywhere near algebraic geometry, both taught high school.

Second, a counting perspective: Research university professors probably average a doctoral student at least every five years, with some averaging more than one a year.  This means every professor produces somewhere between 6 to 40 replacements over the course of their career.  Assuming no change in the number of jobs, only one of those replacements will get a research university professorship.

Third, a practical perspective: It's hard to imagine research in mathematics, especially but not only pure mathematics, having direct practical benefit to many people.  That means the amount of funding purely for research tends to be rather small.  Even at research universities, teaching is an important rationale for paying a professor's salary, and the benefits to teaching are an important justification for research.

What happened between the 1950s and 1980s, particularly in the US, was an enormous expansion in higher education along with a massive increase in research funding.  The US went from having about 5% of its 20-year-olds going to college to about 50%.  Assuming a corresponding increase in the number of professors, this meant a professor could advise 10 PhD students and have every one of them get a job.  For obvious reasons, we will never see a 10-fold increase again.  Also, the US was enormously wealthy and had resources to spend on less practical purposes like mathematical research and providing high quality university education.  (The US still spends about 50% more per university student than Germany.  Most of that is going to smaller classes with more attention paid to helping students along.)