You don't know anyone is really worth it. That's why it's called "research." You pay smart people to explore being smart, because even though most of the effort and money are wasted every so often something wonderful falls out.
Try building GPS without relativity. Try building modern chip designs, lasers, or many medical applications without quantum theory.
It's no different to funding start ups. Most fail. A few win big.
But... a room sharing startup is still utterly trivial compared to finding life on other planets or inventing a new kind of computing. Or game changers like EM theory, quantum theory, relativity, Shannon's information theory, or Turing/Church.
And a room sharing startup is still vastly more useful than the weaponised parasitism of most of the financial sector.
Academics are not the problem. The problem is poor allocation of resources, especially creativity and intelligence - all of which have been badly warped by the peculiar value system propagated by contemporary economics in ways which have left them far less productive than they have been in the past.
Would you think the same about speculative social science? Some nerds find theoretical physics especially cool for its own sake, as opposed to say pure philosophy, but this is not most people's position. They think even space exploration, something much more concrete, is a waste of money. Your value judgment is right, and theirs wrong? They're the one having to clean the literal toilets. The thing also is that quantum mechanics was developed with a fraction of today's money being spent on physics.
On the one hand I completely agree with everything you wrote.
On the other hand, it sounds like what you are proposing is that there should be socialism for sufficiently talented people (I am not actually averse to this, although it seems fairer if it could somehow be extended to everyone).
Private capital will only fund ideas which a) have quantifiable benefit which b) can be captured. This aligns well with patentable pharmaceuticals or adtech, not so well with theories of quantum gravity. Stuff which benefits everyone conventionally has to be funded by government (although a patronage model does not seem impossible).
In the ideal case, how would we work out who are the sufficiently talented (they get socialism, let's call them the eloi), and who will who make their shoes and clean their toilets (it's capitalism for them, let's call them the morlocks)? What fields would be eligible for this kind of support and who would choose that?
It sounds like your complaint is that the existing systems for doing this (grants, tenure, research impact, prestige) are mis-allocating. I agree that existing systems aren't working well. Is it just that there is not enough funding, or does there need to be a rethink somewhere?
It seems fundamentally to be an information problem. That is, it's hard to figure out who and what are worth funding. The information problem is more difficult if the research has a longer time horizon.
Try building GPS without relativity. Try building modern chip designs, lasers, or many medical applications without quantum theory.
It's no different to funding start ups. Most fail. A few win big.
But... a room sharing startup is still utterly trivial compared to finding life on other planets or inventing a new kind of computing. Or game changers like EM theory, quantum theory, relativity, Shannon's information theory, or Turing/Church.
And a room sharing startup is still vastly more useful than the weaponised parasitism of most of the financial sector.
Academics are not the problem. The problem is poor allocation of resources, especially creativity and intelligence - all of which have been badly warped by the peculiar value system propagated by contemporary economics in ways which have left them far less productive than they have been in the past.