Comment by norir
This response comes across as rather defensive and makes a number of assumptions that are not universal across all fields.
From my perspective, the author's basic thesis which is that a) there is a glut of PhDs b) getting tenure is political and c) publication quality is generally low is true. That doesn't mean that people who are successful in the system aren't smart or don't have meaningful real world successes. But my decade in higher ed through a postdoc made it very clear that even at top institutions, many, if not most, faculty are not doing work with significant real world implications.
I get those 3 points but none seem to be the problem they are being portrayed as. Not to say academia does not have huge issues, but these specific ones don’t ring true to me. Granted, my experience is limited to my field- liberal arts academia is very different and shares little with science/engineering academia.
a) There are more PhDs than PI positions, but most of the hard science PhDs are in high demand, in industry jobs that generally pay much better than academic PI positions. At my institution we lose more of the postdocs we would like to recruit as PIs to industry offers than other academic positions. b) You do need a lot of political skill to get tenure, which is unfortunate and pushes out a lot of the smartest scientists. In this sense politics means social and emotional skills- which are required for doing anything involving other, and isn’t unique to academia. Still, sure it would be nice if academia could better accommodate people with technical skill but lacking in political skill. c) Not in my field or experience at least. To publish in a high impact journal nowadays the work usually has to be pretty solid. Obviously not everyone will agree on which work is good or not. Sometimes people do skimp on making it easy to access or use, e.g. publishing good code, making biological samples available, etc. but usually this is because they could not fund that part of the work.
I cannot think of anyone I know in any science or engineering department at research focused university whose work lacks significant real world implications. In fact, I find this annoying- as I think there would be a lot of value in more abstract and risky work, but the big funding agencies only fund things with obvious practical value based on their official priorities.