I don't know the world of drug dealing. But I can say that this article's point of view on academia is mostly wrong. I am myself doing a PhD right now, and I kn

I don't know the world of drug dealing. But I can say that this article's point of view on academia is mostly wrong. I am myself doing a PhD right now, and I know a lot of people who have done PhDs, who are currently PhD students, or who are going to be in the coming years (before starting my PhD I was in a school/uni, the École normale supérieure, in which almost 90% of the students do a PhD since the school's goal is to train future researchers). The reasons to go for this career paths are not money or wealth at all. Not at all. People chose this path because they love physics / philosophy / computer science / literature / math / history… And because they value freedom above many other things, among which money clearly is. Doing a PhD is fun and interesting, and that's the main reason to go with it. The pay during the PhD is indeed not good compared to what we could make by working in the industry, but it's not that bad: we certainly make more than we would by working at MacDonald's (I don't think it is a relevant comparison but that's the example at the beginning of the article). We do a PhD because we enjoy our life with it right now, and because we want to do research (and possibly teaching at uni level) as our job later, without thinking about the salary (some PhD students don't even really know what are the salaries in academia, only that it's not as much as in the industry). The position of a PhD student have nothing that is comparable to the drug dealing field as described in the article. It's sometimes hard, but it's not risky/dangerous and you're not exploited by your hierarchy, or have to fear it in any way. [EDIT to clarify my point] There's is no trade-off such as "I'll take risks and live poorly for now in the hope of becoming rich and famous later" when you choose to do a PhD. If you get to do a PhD, you already have what you want, which is freedom to work on the subject that interests you, very flexible work-hours, the possibility of teaching if you want to (and have some more money for that, which is a nice plus but I guess most PhD students who teach would do it anyway). [/EDIT] I recently wrote a blogpost which did not get any traction here [1], in which I present a quick overview of my PhD work until now in the hope of showing how much I'm enjoying myself as a PhD student :-), and this in order to try to balance a bit the tendency that HN has to present PhD as a waste of time or generally with negative connotations. [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6755727 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6755727