<i>I also care that academics are well-aligned with the problems we care about.</i><p>That is not the point of academia, and indeed not the point of why academics are offered tenure with their institutions.  Please consider Galileo and Copernicus and the Church of the 15th and 16th centuries.  Please consider history.<p>Google as a business may care about research being aligned with its business, or what &#x27;society&#x27; or certain segments of society care about; Google really should not care what academia and academics want to work on.  That is the point of, for better or worse, academia: independent research by some of our smartest people.<p>If Google, and industry, care about what gets research, they should fund it.  They then can choose.  Please leave academia and academics to be just that, academic.<p>Without government funding, support, and indeed the wider academia &#x27;ecosystem&#x27;, my father would have never been able to be a historian of the Scottish enlightenment, and producing the seminal book on Adam Smith.  And if you don&#x27;t think that the Scottish Enlightenment is important to our modern understanding of the Universe, then I suppose that you then have to rethink the contributions of these notable academics, scientists, engineers, and philosophers: David Hume, McLaren, Taylor, James Watt, Telford, Napier--off the top of my head.<p>My point is that my fathers book may not itself be a major contribution to a current revolutionary idea, but it will likely be part of some future realisation about economics, since Adam Smith is a major cornerstone of our current understanding of economic thought.