Elite Underproduction

Even beyond formal credentials scientific progress can primarily only be made by relatively fewer workers then ever holding their position or inching upstream against an increasing current flowing downstream.

I think what you will find is that the rewards for STEM creatives who are in position for their abilities to be leveraged by mass media, will always be greater than those without it.

Microsoft started selling CD's as fast as Michael Jackson but for 10X the price.

DOS had already been pulling people away from natural science since the '80's.

Apple mass-marketed pop music to sell hardware.

Google started as an anti-advertising utility but reversed stance to convert a huge user base into a mass market.

Amazon was all about a mass market to begin with.

Facebook is what the National Enquirer would be like if they had gotten the idea to scale an internet concept and had that kind of capital to strategically deploy earlier.

Mass media has such a major component consisting of fiction this is an attraction plain natural science does not possess. Scientific research has such a focus on pure reality that mainstream interest just can not be maintained continuously, as so much relatively unexciting time must pass before progress finally pushes one little bit of reality to actually become better than fiction.

But that's where it starts to get good.

What would be more interesting to me is some critical analysis of why the American sciences in particular are structured to exclude most of the minds on the planet. What are we losing, for instance, by the fact that our institutions are not able to attract and retain women and other historically underestimated groups? What are we losing by making our immigration regime more repellent to scientific talent, such that more people stay in places where they are not able to maximize their gifts? Especially in the context of the difficulties encountered by the researcher you cited, it seems obvious that an examination of these historic biases is warranted, although it would be more unpleasant & politically charged than railing against capital structures etc.

I'd be interested to see how much of, say, the UNC Chapel Hill chemistry department's research expenditures come out of grants. Do you know how I'd find the information?

Two other points:

> Labs that don't have this often require either a business to subsidize their work or they suddenly become completely reliant in grants.

In what sense is the first case, a business sponsoring the lab, not "grants"?

> It's not really about tenure per se, it's more that the academic business model can provide a stable revenue stream for some research work.

But the original claim was that the cost of employing researchers is lower for an academic lab than it would be for a new lab. ("other labs could hire many more grad students for the same cost.") That has nothing to do with the availability of funding or cross-subsidies! Is it true or not?

There are so-called "soft money" positions that really are 100% grant-funded. In academia, people with those usually have a title like Research Professor and they're expected to pay their own salary out of their grants! They have no teaching responsibilities, since the university isn't directly paying them anything. But imo this is a much more stressful arrangement since you don't have the regular university salary to fall back on. Some researchers at small companies are essentially like that, having to bring in a stream of SBIRs to keep themselves paid.

I don't think researchers' base employment necessarily has to go through universities, it's just ended up as the most common mechanism for researchers to get a stable salary. The Institute for Advanced Study [1] is an alternate model, funding researchers' salaries out of its nearly $1 billion endowment and a stream of donations and institution-level grants, without being attached to a university. Kind of like a "think tank", but for science. But institutions along that model currently (at least in the U.S.) employ a tiny number of researchers compared to either universities or industrial research labs.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Advanced_Study