Comment by godelski

I'd phrase it as people are researching these things because they're important. The reasons they're important are pretty diverse but because of how our economy works the research all ends up being related to profits downstream. Problem is we only measure "profit" as one step back.

To make an analogy, let's pretend we're a company selling water. We measure profit by how many bottles of water we sell. But people like the gp are complaining that building aqueducts, water purifiers, weather machines, or even improving the bottling process "isn't profitable". It's a weird claim and I'm not sure why it's so prolific. It's incredibly myopic