Markets don&#x27;t know how to judge the value of science. Its main product is a non-excludable good -- you can&#x27;t know if a train of experimentation or thought will ultimately be important until long after you have shared the results, but sharing thought&#x2F;results almost entirely removes your market leverage. Therefore, the market says the value of science is... nothing. Which we&#x27;ve collectively decided is pretty obviously not true, so we fund science through the government, but that still doesn&#x27;t give us any way to judge the value we&#x27;re getting in return. Are we funding it too little? Too much? There&#x27;s no way to tell the bang we&#x27;re getting for our buck, we&#x27;re just guessing(footnote). That guess determines the demand for scientists. Market corrections in the academic labor market target that guess, not any underlying market truth, so it&#x27;s hard to say whether they&#x27;re good or not, no matter how much of a True Believer in markets you are.<p>Contrast to, say, video game programming, where the market forces pushing people away from those jobs <i>do</i> represent a fundamental truth that isn&#x27;t obviously baloney: there are more people who want to program video games than society needs&#x2F;wants to program video games.<p>* Given the set of things that market forces tell scientists they should be doing instead of science, I&#x27;m pretty sure we&#x27;re dramatically underfunding them, but that&#x27;s certainly debatable.