Instead, it’s the politics, the inefficiency, and the in-bred hostility towards change has driven these incredible people out of academia.
Good luck getting politics out of human systems involving more than a few tens of people. It's just inevitable.
I don't know what he specifically means by inefficiency and in-bred hostility. One form of inefficiency I can think of is the constant grant writing professors have to do. But then this is just a product of penny pinching politicians and our anti-intellectual culture. I am not sure how academia can fix this.
I have no clue what he means by "in-bred hostility". I'm not the most sociable person in the world, but the number of positive interactions I've had with other researchers is vastly outweighed by the few negative interactions I've had with academic jerks.
The title of "academia eating its young" suggested me to the lament of many in the biomedical fields who seem go from postdoc to postdoc for years on end because permanent faculty positions are few and far between. Again, this is a direct result of the shrinking levels of funding going into research and higher education. This isn't academia eating its young, it's our society eating academia.