I don't think it's necessarily the case that academic science is a shitty value proposition; it could work well if funding were increased (obviously) and the un

I don't think it's necessarily the case that academic science is a shitty value proposition; it could work well if funding were increased (obviously) and the university science model was done away with in favor of something resembling the institute model: 1. Everyone should be able to call themselves a PI and get space if they can bring in grants, and everyone should be able to apply for all grants. You shouldn't be locked out of getting funding just because your employer hasn't given you an arbitrary title. 2. The faculty / student model should be done away with after the masters degree. PIs should be spending 100% of their time doing research (or raising money) and stop wasting time on tenure track nonsense. If you want to employ someone to do science under you as a grad student or post doc is now, then they should be paid a salary at least as large as what a technician would make in industry. There should also be no institute or government ceiling on salary, as people should be able to negotiate for whatever they are worth. 3. Salaries should be increased at the expense of overhead, which could be massively reduced outside of a university. 4. Investigators should own their IP. Institutes should have TLOs in place to help investigators monetize the IP for a percentage of ownership if they want. The main issue with this model would be funding start up packages, which is a non-trivial problem which I haven't figured out a solution for yet. Perhaps these could be partially crowd funded? I would be interested in getting peoples' input.