[Stwerp]

I agree with your sentiment, but sadly science (or rather, the doing of science) is about prestige.

Put yourself in the shoes of a funding agency. If you have two grant proposals, one from somebody at an institution in the middle of the country you haven't heard of, or someone with a strong publication record in big-name journals --- who are you going to award the money to?

A scientist in academia needs funding and publications for tenure. To get publications, funding is needed for equipment, postocs, etc. To get funding, a list of publications is needed so that people recognize your track-record. It keeps on spiraling. To paraphrase from Pratchett in Carpe Jugulum: "Human families raise their successors, but a [s/vampire/professor] is raising competitors." There's a limited funding pool that the researchers are fighting for.

It doesn't seem much better in the industry side of things. For instance, Google [X] is an extremely prominent research lab. However, why? They work on ??? something that no one really knows about for years and don't publish anything. The scientists there may come out in 5 years with something really cool, but if it doesn't pan out, the Google machine will eat it up and the public won't see. Science there is more about the company's prestige than science.

[sycren]

Perhaps prestige needs to be replaced with something else like commercial value. Whilst this will not work for all topics, perhaps it could be one variable in a group of others that should be taken into account.

[czr80]

Well, prestige is used as currency precisely because we as a society need a mechanism to generate knowledge that isn't (immediately) commercializable. I, for one, would find it tragic if we lost that.

[pm90]

Many scientists hate the commercial part of their research. In fact that's sometimes the main reason why some of them choose to stay in (relatively) poorly paid academic positions