My brother abandoned his PhD at CMU just before his defense (which would have gone fine). He was intensely passionate about his topic area, logical frameworks,

My brother abandoned his PhD at CMU just before his defense (which would have gone fine). He was intensely passionate about his topic area, logical frameworks, which is very academic stuff indeed. Not really something you could pursue in industry. As he was wrapping up his PhD he also got his top choice for a post doc position at Inria, but the amount of political maneuvering he had to do to get it made him so angry he abandoned his dream of staying in academia. He just couldn't stomach the idea of having to do that politicking over and over again all his life. So he went to a hedge fund to work a little bit more than a decade, got his magic number of millions, and is a full time dad now. Humanity as a whole is losing out on some potentially amazing long term research and researchers because of this dynamic. I have no idea how to fix it systematically.