My (admittedly biology/pharma-centric) point of view is a bit less fatalistic: Private companies are much more efficient in reaching a well-defined goal. Acad

My (admittedly biology/pharma-centric) point of view is a bit less fatalistic: Private companies are much more efficient in reaching a well-defined goal. Academia is much more efficient in reaching ill-defined goals. The thing is that the majority of goals for basic science are very ill-defined and virtually all breakthroughs are serendipitous (reaching from antibiotics to more recently CRISPR-Cas). So I don't think it makes sense to advocate for one vs the other.