> in some cases, bringing in money is even taken as prima face evidence of those qualities! I can't tell how playful you're being, but in case it's not clear,

> in some cases, bringing in money is even taken as prima face evidence of those qualities! I can't tell how playful you're being, but in case it's not clear, in my experience at most R01 institutions, this is the norm, not the exception. I have so many problems with this piece and its line of thinking I don't even know where to start. The current academic system is characterized by huge gap between reality and the benchmarks that most attempts to try to evaluate theories about academic success and support fail from the get-go because they're so oversimplified. The piece basically adopts this standard paradigm where you have researchers just doing their thing, publishing, putting out into the world, and all you have to do is "read out" their output. The framing of it, in terms of "the distribution of talent", while meaningful at some level, completely ignores the context any given researcher finds themselves in, in terms of institutional culture, support, corruption, everything. There are metrics, and they are gamed in ways that are hard to even start to ennumerate. To take the Li and Agha paper discussed later in the piece: the author notes that "the paper tries to control for prestige by using dummy variables for having a PhD, an MD, or both, and how many years a PI has been in academia" before admitting "these are highly imperfect as proxies of prestige." This is an absurd understatement. In my experience, "prestige" is an extremely diffuse and elusive thing that has more to do with social networking than institutional prestige per se. Previous papers have shown, for example, that one of the biggest predictors of grant receipt is having previously published with people on the review panels. This alone should be striking to anyone, but it points to how this works: it's not superficial markers of prestige necessarily like US News rankings, but subtle things like social associations etc. In recent years there's been a certain amount of attention to sexism in academics of various forms. Putting sexism per se aside, it's nevertheless an example of a social process that has nothing to do with academic talent per se that neverthless can have huge impacts on academic careers. For every social-environmental variable like sexism, there's some other variable operating on some other person characteristics, like age, race, other social background etc. I could go on and on. I think it's telling that the vast majority of the work cited in the piece is pre-2005 (all but one paper?). I would say the academic environment before, say, 2000 is almost inapplicable to today in many respects, and even the period 2000-2005 is very different.