Shocking. People would rather enjoy life not working as hard as hustling (code for taking big risk without much payoff) to get more money to buy more stuff.
In my experience in highly funded research groups that run outside out of traditional management (translation annoying and wasteful tertiary education administration) researchers that make an impact get on just fine and produce excellent results on a liveable wage and being given the space to do their jobs. In my mind, the highly masculine and overly aggressive capitalist mindset that competition == results is either untrue or false and discounts a wide range of motivations, personalities and skill sets which do things of interest or worth in intellectual jobs.