One persistent issue in academia is that to even approach the doorstep of an academic career, one must generally be willing and able to move cities multiple times at rather unpredictable times, delay parenting to the mid thirties or beyond, and/or uproot a spouse and kids x times
This effectively rules out everybody who needs to support family members, or needs their support, fir either physical or emotional reasons, and will also negatively select against other, less extreme forms of local attachment.
I think this is part of the explanation for the relative absence of conservatives in academia and the broader intelligentsia, and the sometimes idiosyncratic personalities of some of the conservatives that do choose it.
For example the persistent inability of epi as a field to really fully internalize the extent to which some people will endanger themselves and others to keep doing what they usually do, with the people they usually do it with, is partly simply due to them being academics.
And that goes for economists as well and e.g. our defaulting to the individual for most modeling needs, and out generally being reasonably well in touch with our inner psycho (which hopefully we can turn on and off, but sometimes the switch gets a little stucky)
Perhaps one solution might be in the direction of making it easier to participate in academic research for people outside if universities. Perhaps PhD grads could take jobs as librarians, or public school teachers, with reduced hours and part of their salary paid for by ...
... research centers and the like. This would tap into the talents and experiences of demographics that can't currently participate in academia, while allowing them to continue to receive and give support to their communities
Even for those that do enter academia, the cost of this is often high. I saw it reported somewhere that the median TT prof that graduated from a top X department doesn't publish anything while on the track. This is usually read in terms of ex post revealed type.
But I know personally a few people for which this was true, and they didn't just sit somewhere happy as clams producing papers that just weren't good enough to be accepted. Most of these cases I know of were people that were happy and productive in Barcelona or Toulouse,...
... , and then got a job somewhere that really didn't suit them and they toughed it out for a couple of years before they got depressed, and their professional and personal lives suffered because of it.
One day, as academics, we might have to answer for the tens or hundreds of thousands of smart, eager, perhaps somewhat impressionable young minds we enticed, trained, and then set up for failure by stranding them far from friends or family.
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