Academia isn't keeping talented people out of the industry. At any point, a talented person can leave the university, join a company, and easily quintuple their earnings.

It's the industry that's keeping talented people out by giving them mundane or bullshit jobs, and not leaving any space for long-term research and vision.

Though I might say that Academia is making a good job of keeping talented people out of it because their incentive structure is skewed.

This. I did not leave academia to search for fame and fortune. I left it because the bureaucracy and politics of it was terrible.

That's true at the same time. It's a tough choice for those talented with love for science or a will to work on solving bigger problems.

>Some argue that keeping talented people out of industry is a downside of the sciences not an upside.

Yeah, instead of understanding the universe and core applications we could have more BS gadgets...

Think of the ads that could've been served!

I see it as the organizational abstraction of industry is an side-effect artifact of relative material scarcity, and a current, hopefully temporary condition in our species' evolution towards a future when advancing sciences becomes one of the major focal points of our endeavors, and the bulk of industry is largely automated away in the trail of a continuously-growing wavefront of advanced-and-advancing industry. Hopefully capitalism and industry will bootstrap us into that outcome, instead of mediocrely settling for a local maxima of extractive rentier structures. "Money is a sign of poverty", wrote Iain M. Banks, and I suspect the transition to that kind of wealth is an evolving continuum instead of an abrupt, sharp discontinuity.