[dahart]

> surely if workers are systematically undercompensated, there is room for a disruptive firm to come in and take the best talent and still make a profit.

Other good replies here, but this part of the comment reveals some assumptions that need better definition. Having been both, I can comfortably say that academics aren’t “workers” in the same way that industry programmers are “workers”. The parent comment is not correct about the norm; programming for research projects is not usually sold for profit later to industry. It happens occasionally, but most academic work stays academic. Sometimes when it does happen, it’s in the form of a spinoff company that brings the original authors of the software, and so they end up getting some of the proceeds… when the business survives.

Also the top comment didn’t say ‘undercompensated’ - in business this has a clinical meaning that someone is being paid lower than market rates. We know that adademics pays lower, but we do not know that it’s lower than market rates for academics. It’s plenty true in industry alone that you can make a lot of money at Facebook or very little money at a small indie game dev shop. That doesn’t mean the indie game devs are undercompensated, it means they’re in a different market.

Starting firms to compensate researchers better is what pharmaceuticals (for example) are. The problem with your suggestion is that the need for income can undermine the ability to do research that is unbiased, risky, controversial, critical, or just free of agenda. If you pay researchers in line with what Bay Area programmers get, it will put an enormous burden on the PIs to make many multiples more money than their peers, and compete with them using a small fraction of the number of people of peer groups.