My personal belief is that it is a significant effect across all disciplines, but that the objective nature of some disciplines offers occasional ways to combat it.<p>My own academia experiences were in machine learning and image processing, and even there it was a heavy competition for demo ware. All ideas were basically vetted for their plausibility of leading to a TED talk or a conference keynote demo. If you proposed something or showed passion for something, but it wasn&#x27;t clear that you could talk it about it while wearing a black turtleneck, then it got rejected pretty quickly. Little if any time was ever given to whether the fundamental questions were good ones or whether their answers constituted value-adding directions for humanity to move in. And don&#x27;t even get me started on teaching. I once got yelled at by an adviser because I spent the time to write up my recitation notes for my probability students in TeX, instead of just scanning my unreadable hand-written notes. Good luck convincing them that investing time into <i>how</i> to teach something is worthwhile.<p>The process of moving past qualifying exams did include some objective hurdles of study (sort of quality control for the university&#x27;s or department&#x27;s brand) but it largely consisted of convincing certain key status figures that you were On Their Team and would be a good spokesperson for the sorts of positions and ideas they most wanted to affiliate with.<p>It will surely vary by discipline, geography, political climate, etc. But I think this is the dominant reason why we have academics at all. I do not think that the well-worn stories about funding fundamental research for society&#x27;s benefit are even remotely true.