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I don't think your last point is a good thing. It sounds like the problem with Academia is the source and requirements of the funding, rather than the work itself.

I'd much rather academia had ample enough funding where people could work on what they wanted and what they felt was useful without the need to appeal to large businesses or metaphorically knife-fight for grants.

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> I'd much rather academia had ample enough funding where people could work on what they wanted and what they felt was useful without the need to appeal to large businesses or metaphorically knife-fight for grants.

That can only ever be a temporary state of affairs unless you deliberately keep the population of researchers small. Competition for scarce resources exists except in high growth domains and growth does not stay high forever. Realistically an even larger majority of PhDs than nowadays would get expelled to industry and other places academics don’t care about like unemployment.

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