I turned down an opportunity to do a really interesting Ph.D in machine learning / biologically-inspired computation because I wasn't either willing or able to

I turned down an opportunity to do a really interesting Ph.D in machine learning / biologically-inspired computation because I wasn't either willing or able to take the vow of poverty required. Since then I've consistently made many times what most scientists make doing programming and even IT work that is far below my abilities. Basic research is economically worthless-- you can't patent a concept or a law of nature, nor can you sell understanding of nature's principles to anyone. The transistor may be worth billions, but the understanding that enabled the transistor is worth $0 as there is no way to monetize it. The economic worth of scientific understanding seems to obey an extreme hockey-stick graph: it is worthless until it nears the instant of delivering a marketable technology, at which point it skyrockets. As a result, the market only rewards the last few people in a very long line of innovation that began with basic principles. Mark Zuckerberg is worth billions. How much is Tim Berners-Lee worth? How about the communications theorists before him that pioneered the idea of hypertext? (Do we even know who they were?) ... and so on, with each step back in time being worth exponentially less. Why do science, except as a hobby?