Yeah. I can probably see that point of view, but I do disagree with quite a lot of the details--I believe a market works great in certain specific and relativel

Yeah. I can probably see that point of view, but I do disagree with quite a lot of the details--I believe a market works great in certain specific and relatively small scale circumstances, especially since it's a relatively effort-free system to set up, outside of those domains, the modus of "the market" seems to starts diverging more and more wildly from what I consider "good", or "to the benefit of those whose lives it affects"--but that becomes a philosophical discussion that might be a bit OT here. We can totally agree that academia's approach is similarly imperfect. > They will even be rewarded again if they did something the market needed but didn't know it wanted. Here you are conflating again "what the market needs/wants" with "good" > In any case, you are not spending the public money, and you are redeemable (you can be fired or run out of your own money) which discourages waste. That's not entirely fair reasoning. Just because what you describe here is the way a market discourages waste, doesn't mean that a different system like academia doesn't have its own ways in place to discourage waste. Which it does. And both systems have their fair share of examples where these methods fail spectacularly.