One thing that severely affects my view of this wealth divide is seeing how hard my wife struggles and studies and works so that she can get an MD/PhD and do research and make about a tenth of what she could make as a private physician. Not only would she make less per year, but she has to spend a long, long time in school in order for that privilege.

That’s what academic scientists are like. There’s more money to be made in the ‘applied’ side of nearly every field. And yet many of the most brilliant become researchers because they have true passion and love for the subject and they want to advance science. And they make astonishing, amazing discoveries that improve our quality of life immeasurably. Sure, a few private companies do serious R&D, but only a few— and the output of discovery from the state university system is amazing.

And yet the talk on taxation assumes the people who are making the most money are the most productive. It is not true. It is nowhere near true. True genius pretty much breaks the capitalist system since it is impossible to measure how much it’s worth over time. Breakthroughs in science are invaluable. If we didn’t have them, we could have no progress.

I really wish people would recognize the debt that they owe to hard-working academics, researchers, and the like. It is far more than those people have been compensated for. But instead we get bullshit about ‘ivory tower’ and academic privilege and ‘in the real world’.

Bitch, the real world is the one where my wife will stay overnight in the lab, waking every three hours to make sure that her experiment is running perfectly so that she can cure goddamn cancer.