[lazyjones]

The kind of sophistry nonsense that passes as a scientific study these days is amazing.

Agriculture is worth much more than physics, since it feeds physicists all by itself. You could come up with many such dependencies to create chains of "worth more" relations, all utterly pointless. If the idea was to get more funding for physicists, it's unconvincing.

[dTal]

Your example with agriculture doesn't really support your argument that dependency chain analysis is 'utterly pointless'. Agriculture is more important than physics; we would never prioritize physics research over food. So this example seems like a success for this analytical method.

[imtringued]

Modern agriculture would be impossible without artificial fertilizer.