Get paid to answer important questions instead of getting paid to provide sought-after results. I think that's the end-point, the "how we get there" is now the question!
The usual critique of academia is that people are expected to publish a lot (which creates wrong incentives) and that nobody really accesses quality of the publications (which gives opportunities to cheat). At the same time there is huge PhD overproduction, which creates competition.
I don't think the problem is that people are working on wrong problems, the problem is how they work on problem of their choice and why.
I also don't think there is a simple fix to this problem.