I’ve written recently in the Daily Reckoning on how DEI is excellent for getting people (especially white men) out of the cubicle and into real jobs, all without incurring ridiculous levels of college debt.

Yesterday, my friend and colleague Adam Sharp wrote about DEI Doctors and Nuclear Engineers, which is well worth your time.

But in some unexpectedly good news, the marketplace is forcing professors out of academia and into jobs far more useful. Don’t get me wrong, some subjects need long periods of research. But we don’t need smart people trapped in the ivory tower forever, especially if they’re not teaching students.

Reading The Wall Street Journal this morning was an unexpected pleasure. Ben Cohen wrote a peach of a piece about the math legend Ken Ono joining Axiom, an AI startup founded by one of his former students.

Historically, academia functions as a semi-sheltered enclave where high-IQ but temperamentally meek people survive and even flourish in ways the broader labor market often punishes.

But getting these brainboxes into the real world is imperative. There are many reasons academia’s nerd protection prowess is a societal hindrance. Now, that tide may be turning.

Take the Ken Ono-Axiom story, for example. This top-notch mathematician left a safe, tenured university job and jumped into a super demanding, product-focused industrial role. He’s now using his specialized brainpower to build practical, useful tools for regular users.

Academia Protects the Meek Geeks

Academia’s institutional design insulates specific cognitive profiles (read: brilliant, but noncombative nerds) from the harsher selection mechanisms of the market.

Once someone clears the brutal early filters of academia (PhD, tenure-track), the career path is unusually predictable. Status is tied to publications and peer reputation.

Success in the real world is measured by a combination of quantitative metrics—like sales figures, profits, and client retention—and qualitative attributes, such as charisma, leadership skills, and the capacity to manage office politics.

Academia allows extraordinarily bright but socially risk-averse or conflict-averse people to specialize in obscure work (like decades of pure number theory) without being constantly re-evaluated by quarterly P&Ls or aggressive managers.

Academia’s protective structure has an upside. It creates a refuge where long time-horizon projects, weird ideas, and solitary obsessives can persist for years, which is often necessary for deep theoretical advances.

It also provides a kind of soft social safety net—tenure, relative job security, and a clear status hierarchy—so that people who are ill-suited to networking, self-promotion, or opportunistic job-hopping can still convert their raw intelligence into a stable livelihood and some influence.

Forcing Talent Out of the Ivory Tower

At the same time, when the very best minds are locked in sheltered environments, much of their potential value to the rest of society is transmitted only indirectly through papers, teaching, and prestige, rather than through systems, products, or institutions that directly change how people live and work.

When those people are pulled—or pushed—into the market, their optimization target shifts. Instead of maximizing citations or internal disciplinary status, they’re forced to solve externally constrained problems with direct consequences, which tends to yield more tangible output per unit of intelligence.

The Axiom case illustrates this.

Ken Ono’s move from a tenured chair to “founding mathematician” at a well-funded startup means his theoretical skill is being pointed at building an “AI mathematician.” That AI mathematician may accelerate discovery across domains such as drug development, energy, and complex engineering. Ono won’t be proving more theorems for a closed audience.

There is a real opportunity cost here. Every competent person who stays in an insulated, low-accountability office on campus is one less person attacking concrete bottlenecks in technology, infrastructure, or medicine.

How Does Society Benefit?

Incentivizing nerds to move out of the academic refuge tends to produce three broad net gains:

The first gain is repricing talent. Once exposed to market signals, the most capable academics discover where their marginal hour is most valuable, which often turns out to be in high-leverage roles in industry or startups rather than in incremental publication races.

Next, the technology transfer is palpable. Getting someone with deep expertise, like Ono at Axiom, really speeds up the process of turning cutting-edge ideas into practical Minimum Viable Products (MVPs). The fact that they can already announce these systems are solving big problems shows just how fast this development is moving.

Finally, there’s a cultural recombination of academics and practitioners. The influx of academically trained minds into competitive environments forces a combination of academia’s (theoretically) rigorous, truth-seeking norms and industry’s outcome-driven, resource-constrained thinking. That’s what solves complex, real-world systems problems rather than elegant toy problems.

Wrap Up

Abolishing the academic refuge altogether isn’t the way to go. Some fraction of truly fundamental work requires the long, quiet corridors academia uniquely provides.

However, shifting the marginal brilliant person from a protected, inward-facing track toward domains where their success is tightly coupled to concrete improvements in the world—precisely what the Hong–Axiom story shows—is almost certainly a net positive for everyone who lives outside the ivory tower.

Long may it continue.