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I will disagree with every single suggestion you make:

1. Salaries should be -higher-, not lower! Why will any self respective smart person want to throw their intelligence away for a pittance? You want them to be smart with science and stupid with money is it? Live like Diogenes?

2. There shouldn't be more researchers, there should be less. My decade-long experience with academia has been that too many people who aren't exactly scientifically smart (more smart at socializing and grant writing) are too established. We need to recruit the type of minds that are truly capable of innovation and make sure they don't have to compete with beuraucrats who're there simply because they chose biology in undergrad and just kept making the default career choice every time they were presented one. These new people should also be REALLY smart, not just marginally better than public. Which means that there can't be too many of them anyways. They should then be given resources that don't inherently convert the entire system into a Ponzi scheme (like the phd system now does). In the grand scheme of things they can be given lower resources if they are given structures to manage things well.

3. I'd argue that the tenure system worked quite well despite its flaws. If anything tenure doesn't give the same guarantees it gave half a century ago, so people are still incentivized to continue running the rat race. If you still want to hold them accountable maybe a much longer cycle might be okay, perhaps 15 years? 5 year contract sounds like hell for most fields. Some of the most interesting work I did took more than that time to bear fruition and that's not uncommon.

Only thing I'll agree with you is that we should make sure that whatever new process is conceived must try to correct perverse incentives for women, given how the current system plays against some common life choices they might want to make (having kids).

> Why will any self respective smart person want to throw their intelligence away for a pittance? You want them to be smart with science and stupid with money is it?

Because it buys them the freedom to do what they want in terms of research, rather than being a slave to a certain agenda, or a quota, or what have you. Science progresses by empowering curious people. If a researcher was interested in making money, then they would focus on money-making discoveries and spin off startups (which already happens plenty now).

> There shouldn't be more researchers, there should be less. My decade-long experience with academia has been that too many people who aren't exactly scientifically smart (more smart at socializing and grant writing) are too established.

That's because the academic and publishing incentives are all skewed, like the OP said, not because we have too many people doing research. If the low-hanging fruit has been plucked, then we need more eyeballs looking at things from all sorts of different perspectives to find pieces that don't quite fit our established theories.

I have an agreement and a disagreement with your take:

* I agree that reducing salaries for academics will only make the currently misplaced incentives worse. It will deprive society from the valuable research that more competent and talented folks would have done. In my mind, the key point in all these budgetary conversations is the ballooning bureaucratic/administrative layer that is eating up more and more of the budget and making it harder for universities, as collectives of teachers and researchers, to adapt to the evolving priorities of the real world.

* I disagree that there should be less researchers. Fewer academics, maybe, but we definitely need more people who can make a lifestyle out of entirely or partially doing research. My admittedly anecdotal impression is that for every "not exactly scientifically smart" person who secures tenure, there are a handful of would-have-been-great researchers who just get fed up and leave academia despite having the passion, competence, and the willingness to even make a few sacrifices.

IMHO we have cornered ourselves into a false dichotomy (broad strokes here, there are exceptions of course): either (a) you are an academic, you have to pull 60 hr weeks to do any meaningful research, and you have to deal the ossified structural issues of academia, or (b) you are out in the wild, make a lot more money, but you spend your 40 hr weeks towards maximizing short-term profits of your employer. I would think were there a viable alternative to this dichotomy that many passionate and competent people would happily make some reasonable sacrifices (in pay, work hours) to engage meaningfully in much-needed research.

As someone who has now experienced both sides of the dichotomy (80 hr weeks underpaid and overworked in academia, 40hr weeks bored out of mind doing coding), a compromise would be great.

Personally I'm hoping to keep my job to pay the bills and start a garage lab and pursue my passions in science. It'll severely be underfunded, but I'm hoping to conceive things that can be done with machines that hopefully costs only as much as a boat would. Further, Richard hamming is on to something [1] when he suggests that great science happens when resources are scarce.

[1] http://www.paulgraham.com/hamming.html

I don't think reducing salaries will have any effect on the caliber of academics. There are a ton of graduate students, postdocs, and research scientists glad to work for less. Most are just as qualified as the faculty who supervise them. Likewise, the quality at faculty at elite schools and state schools is identical; the key difference in research output comes from access to resources.

Money isn't everything that motivates people. And you want to get exactly the kinds of people who are motivated by curiosity, not power and prestige.

The salary needs to be enough to live on without financial stress. On the other hand, it doesn't need to guarantee anything beyond cafeteria-grade food, basic housing, and a beat-up old car.

Benefits are important too. Things like university medical, insurance, and retirement policies reduce the risk profile. Academics shouldn't be distracted or stressed by financial constraints, but neither should they be motivated by them.

I don’t think you really understand what professors make already. Even a CS professor at UCLA is barely breaking $100k, and they would be in dire straights for their market if the university didn’t back their housing loan. Sometimes professors have the option of topping up their salary out of their research grants, but that has a few problems in itself.

It's a little tough to generalize about salary in academia.

Obviously, a 'professor' covers multiple ranks in the academic hierarchy, but if you look at the published pay scales for assistant professors (I believe the lowest professor ranking with tenure) at University of California, it looks like large majority of them are breaking $100k [1]. I don't see a way of breaking those results into discipline, I'd imagine that those individuals in fields like CS vs. more academia-exclusive fields like literature or geography (relatively, anyway) are making towards the higher scale of that. Some of them in with clearly medical-related title are making much more, but I think that's to be expected.

Also, it's possible I'm mistaken, but I believe professors are allowed to be paid to act as advisors or "resources" for external organizations to act as a secondary revenue stream? Combined with topping off their salary with research grants as you pointed out, and the nice perks academia offers if you can get tenure (job security, etc.), I'm not sure that even this data fully encapsulates compensation either way

[1] https://ucannualwage.ucop.edu/wage/ (type in "asst prof" to title search, with ALL location selected)

AFAIK an assistant professor typically is on the tenure track, but doesn't have it yet (= they'll get tenure if they meet certain goals during this time)

Ah, you're correct. I was thinking about associate professorship, which it looks like is usually accompanied by tenure. Sorry, I sometimes get a little mixed up between which one of those is on the tenured/non-tenured side of things.

Tenured CS professors at MIT/Harvard/Stanford/Berkeley/etc. start at $180k, $200kish is probably median, and upper bound is much higher.

>I'd place these at $60k-$100k: enough to live on, but not enough to go into it for anything other than love-of-science.

Why shouldn't universities be able to compete for labor with corporations?

>A university president might hit $200k.

University presidents aren't scientists, nobody would take that job "for the love of science."

Wouldn't that pay scale push many talented people to work in private industry? At that pay it would be difficult to retain computer science faculty for example, where universities are already struggling with a shortage.

Only the ones optimizing for money and not for passion.

Not everyone can afford to pursue their passion at the cost of a cut salary. A common case would be the need to support a family, parents, relatives, etc.

Wouldn't it be better to have skilled scientists than passionate scientists?

I think that's a naive view. It's not just academics optimising for money. It's academics optimising for a balanced relationship, or a family, or even just friends (since the current academic system will also often mean displacement).

I was very passionate about the work I did in academia, but I did not want to force my wife to live in a region where she could not really get a decent job, and my income would barely have been enough to support children in the early part of the academic career. I am strongly considering going back to academia in a few years, after the income doesn't matter as much anymore.

Making the financial disincentive even stronger would filter out a certain type of person, and is not a great way of achieving diversity of people.

This is what I'm going to do, I left working in academia in 2015 even though I'm still super fascinated by the research we were doing (although I though our lab application was bit banal for my tastes, but it's what got the grants) and started expanding on it on my own in my free time while working in industry.

I about to quit my job and work on it again for fun.

Plenty of people who love science also want to be able to go on holidays, buy houses and have children. They want to live the kinds of lives people of their social class do. Your proposal would turn science into a career for the kind of people who were monks or nuns in the Middle Ages. Back then that was the way to live the life of the mind and the outside alternatives were much worse. Things have changed.

In my view, $150k-$200k is already low. Anybody with the drive and focus to become a professor, can already earn more as a doctor, or even as a computer programmer. It's already the case that it only attracts people who are in it for the love of science.

In a similar fashion, lowering the incomes of classical musicians won't make classical music any more creative.

> It forces people to put in massive efforts early-career.

From what I understand and have heard, a lot of advancements in math and physics in particular have come from people that are quite young, often in their 20s. That's apparently when brains are at their peak; it seems to me that's the period in which massive efforts are most likely to pay off big.

Einstein was 26 when he published his annus mirabilis papers. I believe Newton was in his mid-20s when he began developing calculus.