[danielbarla]

The economics of this topic have always been interesting to me, especially when compared to various other fields. What is there to incentivize people to enter STEM fields, and especially research?

As a point of comparison, there are ~540 premier league football players, with an average salary of 3.5 million pounds. (Yes, that's average, not median, but there's less than 20 of them that earn under 200k.) It's not _that_ exclusive of a club, and the remuneration is insanely disproportionate, compared to academics - I highly doubt there are hundreds of researches earning millions.

So, yes, it's pretty odd to have some random people dish out these prizes, and they are a drop in the pond. However, I personally feel it's way too little, and that the targets of the prizes are far more deserving - even if it's a popularity contest - than random entertainers (even if they are quite entertaining). But, it's up for argument, and the markets obviously don't seem to agree with me.

[zimpenfish]

Weirdly, if you sniff the XHR from [0] (when it loads a new page), it claims there's 1171 players for 24/25. Except if you look at a few of the teams individually, they're between 30-35 players. Which is much more in line with your ~540 than their 1171.

> the remuneration is insanely disproportionate

I once pointed out that Kevin De Bruyne, on his own, gets paid almost half as much (~21M) as the entire salary cap of the Rugby Union Premiership (~2022, 50M) (to make the point there's much more money in football than rugby.)

[0] https://www.premierleague.com/players

[psb217]

"I highly doubt there are hundreds of researches earning millions." -- by doing purely academic research, maybe not. But, the number of people who have moved from academia to industry off the strength of their research and made millions is probably much larger than you think. I'd wager just in ML you could round up a few hundred between OpenAI, Anthropic, Google/DeepMind, NVidia, Meta/FAIR, etc.

[aeonik]

If Physicists could split atoms with only their arms and legs with some safety equipment, I bet they would get paid even more than 3.5 million pound salary.

[ben_w]

Splitting atoms? Nah, that's the easy one, you can do that yourself even if you're quadriplegic and in a coma.

Even fusion is high school science fair stuff.

Spallation, antiprotons, quark gluon plasmas? Now you're talking.

[elashri]

If this was true then we would find that jobs with physical labor pays much more than what it currently pays.