Institutional decay in the academy is obvious to anyone who looks

From Against the Burden of Knowledge by Maxwell Tabarrok.  The subheading is Why the most intuitive explanation for ideas getting harder to find is wrong.  

An interesting argument but this is the observation which caught my eye.  Emphasis added.

Another explanation which equally explains our observations is that the institution of academia is depreciating. Inward looking networks of grant applicants and reviewers reward a fixed cohort of researchers that gets older every year. Risk averse funders and reviewers that reward incremental, labor intensive research. A business model based on exclusivity that requires more and more hurdles as the initial pool of applicants grows.

Institutional decay in the academy is obvious to anyone who looks and can explain our observations of aging, narrowing careers in academia.

Tabarrok may or may not be right that academia is depreciating (I think he is right), but the weightier issue is that, like many inconvenient truths, we are choosing to turn a blind eye.

Of course this entirely parallels the obvious cognitive decline of President Biden, evidenced over the past two years and almost unavoidable in the past twelve months, but now out in the open.  It was ignorant, cruel and forbidden to discuss until that point of inflection leading to the preference cascade when it is no longer forbidden, it is now necessary to discuss.

Same with Russian disinformation campaigns, Hunter Biden's laptop, the lag origins of COvid-19, the failure of the public health institutions during the pandemic, the catastrophe of renewable energy, the catastrophe of anthropogenic global warming, the deleterious effects of uncontrolled illegal immigration, the reality of genetics on life outcomes, the fact that gender income differences are the product of choices rather than discrimination, and on and on.  Things which the institutions and establishment insist are true as long as they can get away with the lies/errors and then which suddenly reverse when the truth can no longer be denied.

Just look for the truth.  Ignore the noise.  Assume that the institutional narrative is both self-serving and wrong.