[frogeyedpeas]

Sometimes low barriers result in better results.

If the rent in a city is too high you are not going to get the MOST interesting restaurants, bars, and clubs. You are going to get only the businesses that will DEFINITELY convince an investor to write a check to dump on such high rents; regardless of whether that is a good idea or not.

The PhD cohorts for R1 Universities hasn't really gotten any bigger than 50 years ago. The number of academic jobs hasn't really gotten any bigger either. The only people having success in the system are the types of people that seem low-risk to the system.

So of course we should expect a decline in innovative ideas as time rolls on. The only way to reverse this is to literally create more tenured jobs (or perhaps temporary tenure ex: 10 years you're guaranteed employment) and increase the size of PhD student cohorts so that they are large enough that iconoclasts can fit in again.

[advael]

You make a really good point. Defining risk in terms of financial ROI and trying to assess it algorithmically and default-gating more and more endeavors behind such risk assessment is a surprisingly coherent model for a lot of widespread modern rot

[vinnyvichy]

Thanks for being one of the few commenters questioning the microconomic angle itself. In my view, the problem is that no rational economic agent will ever embrace the idea that research should be expensive. Well some very few of us do, we realize that we are competing against Nature and the Universe (not other economic entities), so one of the sensible avenues left to us is to try and recuperate all the losses that have already gone into past research. (maybe Kepler was trying desperately to salvage Hellenic heliocentrism? He also had a thing for platonic solids, after all)

[salomonk_mur]

There is another way.

Reinvent the way academic careers work. No need to even have the concept of tenure. No need to get a PhD degree to be recognized as someone researching something.

Anyone should be able to publish research without being on such restrictive terms. The article's main takeaway is that the institution of academia has perverse incentives that hold back innovation. I believe the way jobs and degrees are structured are part of that.

[tsimionescu]

How do you decide which researchers to invest in? Ultimately you need some kind of institution to organize this, and I promise you it will end up very similar to a university.

Also, tenure is generally seen as a very important part of research. Without tenure your livelihood is dependent on your output and your relationships, which creates numerous perverse incentives. You can't research things which might lead nowhere, or you'll lose your job. You can't prove some other senior researcher wrong, or they might work to have you fired.

With tenure, this all goes away: you are free to choose your own path in research, and empowered to know you don't have any superiors who can lose you your livelihood if you step on their toes, or their friends' toes. Of course, this is the ideal. In practice, lots of tenured professors actually want to become ever more wealthy and powerful and are not content with the guarantees of their tenuership.

[Ar-Curunir]

I mean, anybody can do research and publish their papers in whatever journal. There’s no rule stating you need a PhD to do that

[beryilma]

> I mean, anybody can do research and publish their papers in whatever journal.

Not really true. Publishing research in a reputable journal without an academic affiliation is many times more difficult. Sure you don't need a PhD to publish, but you pretty much need an academic affiliation.

Good or bad, researchers without an affiliation are often taken as crackpots.