I agree that the root cause of a lot of it (although not all of it) is funding. I basically share your perspective about long-term funding. I personally would l

I agree that the root cause of a lot of it (although not all of it) is funding. I basically share your perspective about long-term funding. I personally would like to see indirect costs in the US eliminated, or much more heavily reduced, audited, and justified. I also think there needs to be dramatic shifts in funding along the lines of what you mention. Proposals have already been floated, by former federal funding heads no less, along these lines. Lotteries would be good, as would awards based on merit rather than application (Hungary's model of funding people based on bibliometric factors is a good idea, even if it runs into the problem of gaming citations as pointed out here). Longer-term funds also seem like a good idea, which is the whole idea of tenure in theory. There are other factors at play too, that are harder for me to pin down. Funding models are a big problem, but there's something related to attention-seeking or metrification at play too. Some of this has probably always been around, but in talking to older colleagues I get the sense that things are much more splashy and fad-driven than they used to be, with much greater pressure to produce in volume. A colleague explained that when it's that much easier to write and publish a paper, there's more of an expectation that you do more of them, even though the idea development time isn't any shorter.