[gfour]

True. By "competitive" I didn't mean "same money", but "an equally good choice for enough people to fill the PhD ranks". Bad or non-existent wages are almost never an easy choice, no matter how much one wants to do research or become a professor (unless they already have money and can be self-funded during the PhD). Lack of funding can lead to part-time PhDs or extra day jobs, making it more taxing, lowering the quality of the research, and even leading to failure to complete the degree (in which case, the person just wasted their time).

A PhD student should get a "living wage" as you say -- enough compensation to be able to continue and finish. Industry wages and research wages are different: being paid to work on a product which has a financial plan behind it works differently from trying to improve the state of the art, which can lead to small contributions or even a mathematical proof that it cannot be done :-)