Aye, exactly that. Even as someone who loves to do a dumb research project, it's starting to irk me how much funding can apparently go into essentially studying

Aye, exactly that. Even as someone who loves to do a dumb research project, it's starting to irk me how much funding can apparently go into essentially studying the various detrimental effects of poverty in exactly the same ways and concluding "well clearly poverty correlates with [broadly defined bad outcome] but there's no way to determine causality here"