[bsf_]

I believe this is close to the truth. Moving one step further upstream, the emphasis on high ROI stems from an overall lack of availability of funding. Since there isn't enough money to go around, it becomes necessary to choose some more selective metric to pare down the pool of grant applicants.

[virtuallynathan]

Do we just have too many people doing “science”? Clearly people are getting funding to crank out nonsense, boring papers, studies that can’t be replicated, etc.

[bsf_]

Only if you believe that as a society we have solved all of the interesting problems. Since this obviously is not true, I would instead focus on the way we evaluate science to improve it.

[virtuallynathan]

I’m mostly suggesting the money isn’t well distributed, and I’m pretty sure that’s due to the misaligned incentives. If we incentivized outcomes we care about, I suspect more money would come naturally from the results.