Politics, of course, is part of the humanity, but it manifests differently in different environments (academia vs industry, or then vs now). There is undoubtedly politics in industry, however, there are also products and reality checks. The companies won’t survive if they operate entirely based on politics. In academia, on the other hand, the environmental feedback can be weaker depending on the subject; there, politics could come to the fore. Amusingly, Kissinger said, politics in academia is specially vicious precisely because the stakes are so low.
As for then versus now, there used to be a lot of low-hanging fruit that could be taken until 1980s, and there weren’t many researchers. But now there are fewer accessible opportunities, with far more researchers. If you consider that the size of the cake has not increased proportionally (due to factors mentioned in the article), while the number of players has increased substantially, you may conclude that the environment has become much more competitive. Increased competition indicates increased politics, emphasis on selling, networking, and other non-scientific factors relevant to industry, except there you actually get paid. The conditions are nowadays totally different. There all sorts of performance metrics (H-index, citations, number of papers etc), that have become target, in place of good science, which are gamed.
The other irony is that Teller himself was part (came out) of one of the biggest counter examples. The Los Alamos project pushed unprecedented funding into science, and it let to many discoveries that would have taken decades longer otherwise.
Salaries for PhDs and PostDocs are a different story of course. They are alright in theory, but often you can only get a part time job, which in reality means a > full time job with a part time salary.
Around 80k €/year as W2 professor base salary
Post-tax 55k €
Guess that might be considered incredibly well paid in Germany
Injecting a ton of money creates perverse incentives and attracts people who are not interested pursuing something out of curiosity and interest, but for the money.
I think it probably creates a hostile environment for people who are there out of pure interest, because if there is a way to earn more money/status/power/whatever by doing something other than good work people will do it. So you effectively get punished for doing what you're supposed to instead of playing the game.
I think the "professional money extractor" explanation here is an apt description: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18003253.
If you only give money and positions to people with "passion" when there is a clear demand for more, that's called exploitation. Maybe consider becoming an aerospace investor instead, that field is full of talent chasing after lost dreams for pennies. If you are a software engineer on this forum, you know damn well what your net worth is in the current North American market compared to the other legacy engineering fields. It is patronizing to expect the other scientific fields to be worth "less" than CS.
That's just an excuse to exploit people. The same nonsense as with teachers. "We want teachers that are passionate, not there just for the money". Bah.
In the end we're trying to get stuff done, and it doesn't really matter whether the pipes are kept clean by somebody really passionate for sanitation, or somebody who just thinks the pay is good enough to tolerate the smell.
I can only speak from personal experience and observations in my environment, but to me this statement sound like a dark, cynical joke.
There is plenty of scientists who would love to work on interesting things, are hired as scientists, but once they are hired, no one actually lets them work on scientific problems.
Even looking at the peer review process: it was much more informal in the distant past, and maybe more akin to what happens today with invited papers in my experience, or with small open source software projects.
There were certaintly very petty but intense personal squabbles in the past but that's a bit different from the pervasive structural issues in science today.
At some level too, I don't care what it was like 100 years ago. I can still see the problems today.
Watson and Crick's famous 1953 paper where they presented the double helix of DNA is one such example.
I wish things like the research in this blog post got more attention, because it's important in understanding how things have and have not changed.
To some extent it depends on the weakness of humans for status and competition, because they are powerful motivators to drive advances.
I personally left science because I could see it had 98% overlap with what I'd do as an engineer (or entrepreneur, in the case of a PI), with a tiny fraction of the monetary benefit. Being a winner in that system is a great life, but it rests upon a huge pyramid of people who are working their butts off at low pay and lower prestige, for a brass ring that few will ever grasp.
I am a PI.
What I spent my day doing was dealing with managerial tasks, fiddly stuff for funding applications, etc.
I got to actually code for a whole day last week, and it was marvelous. It was also only possible because it was an all-hands-on-deck, everything else can wait situation.
I said exactly the same thing when I first left academia for tech, and people would look at me suspiciously and ask why I'd ever do such a thing. I looked at every PI I knew, and saw a task essentially identical to running a startup, but with no financial upside -- and the downside risk of being jobless and adrift if you don't get tenure.
Really compared to the shenanigans with Newton, Leibnitz or Hooke and Newton, much of what we see today is quite harmless. Or take for a more recent example Teller and Oppenheimer. I think in science (but not only in science) we tend to idealise the old days and scientists, because we remember the discoveries not the politics and their personal flaws. I would even argue that this greatly demonstrates the success of the scientific process. In the end the best science won, despite all the political infighting.