> So those five labs have a pretty good shot at doing interesting work, even some of that is going to reproduce and some of it isn’t. But once you get out of those top five labs, it’s pretty much make-work, incremental, marginal improvements at best, and a complete waste of time otherwise. And I said “good God, why does the other 90% continue to get funded if you know this?” And he said, “well, there are all these universities and professors who have tenure, there are all these journals, there are all these systems and people have been promised lifetime employment.” Anyway, a longwinded way of saying that we have pretty serious structural and incentive problems in the research complex. "

This seems like an non-thorough and fairly uninteresting answer to the question.

I would want to know how much useful-but-not-groundbreaking stuff still comes out of the "make work" crowd, how wide you need the funnel to be at the top to make sure you catch the people who can end up in the top labs and who make breakthroughs, how much of a "safety net" that you need to make sure people are motivated to jump into the funnel in the first place rather than going into something safer, etc.

A world where we have fewer "wasteful" make-work research jobs but also have fewer breakthroughs isn't great. Hell, you could call the majority of today's service- and information-oriented non-academic jobs "make-work" too (let's up those clickthrough rates! let's stream this video in 8k instead of 4k! let's move this money around slightly faster!). So is there necessarily much utility in moving "make-work" researchers into other fields?