Over nine years ago, I had launched the Science 2.0 movement and over eight years ago, this site, the communications pillar of Science 2.0, was launched. It didn't take long to find evidence of a problem that I hadn't really considered. The movement was about modernizing 'science', and that meant making collaboration and communication and publication and participation realistic in the 21st century.

But in 2005, when I was thinking about this, I wasn't thinking about people as much as the institution. Academic science seemed more like small businesses - small groups at universities were paying people based on competing for grants, from the government 50 percent of the time, and if you did not win, you were out of business and people got fired. This seemed like an odd process, because it prevented collaboration. Who would want  to give their competitors the advantage of failures they had to spend time and money on?

Rather than recognize this weakness, the Federal government was promoting it; they were spending more and more money advocating Science, Technology, Engineering and Math careers and implying that the only real science was the government kind. We see this in culture today. Corporate science is inherently unethical - scientists are engaged in pay-to-play - but academics were wholesome and pure, regardless of how much fraud and error was found.

And more money kept being spent promoting it. Billions of dollars, from a dozen government agencies. When Senator Tom Coburn, government's only fiscal hawk, noted that fixing duplication and waste could save enough money to fund 125,000 post-doctoral researchers, he was vilified for it. Now we produce 6X as many PhDs as there are jobs in academia to fund them, thousands of Ph.D.s work as waiters or other jobs that don't require a Dr. title, and there are calls for the government to fix the system.

That is like asking a mugger to stop crime. 

Academia today means the likelihood of doing a post-doc until the late 30s or early 40s - I warned about that trend in the 1990s, because in Japan the average age was 42 due to government control of basic research - while someone with a bachelor's degree and experience will make much more during that time.

We don't just have a wage gap between CEOs and workers in the private sector, we have an alarming wage gap between tenured faculty and post-docs, and it is more of a concern, because an immigrant can get off a boat in the US and become a millionaire, but academia is created a caste system where a lot more than competence is the metric for advancement. Young post-docs will have to meet a number of cultural qualifications to get ahead. Anyone deviating from that quickly realizes they don't belong and exits the system for the corporate world, where diversity is more welcome.