All of those people are academics par execellance. I'm not talking about business-ified institutional academica. I'm talking about spending a long time on a topic, researching it and thinking deeply, clearly on it before you offer your opinion as though it were valuable.

pg spent weeks on each of his early essays. He spent a solid month writing What You Can't Say. He spent at least a couple days writing this one. They aren't opinion pieces.

>>Not about the subjects they research. That is the purpose of research.

They are cluless _especially_ about the subjects they research.

Most philosophy, political economy etc academics are beyond mediocre -- not only in advancing their field, but even in understanding the greats who contributed to it and rightfully presenting their knowledge.

Most real development comes from outsiders to this system -- people incombatible with academic life, even if they happen to work as professors (like Adorno or Wittgenstein did for example). And that was true already in the '40s and '50s, were academic discourse and research freedom in those fields was extremelly better compared to (market driven, low quality, paper churn) today's reality.

>The audience I would be targeting in a critique of the man (via a critique of his under-informed rants) are those who equate money with success and "money-making" with intelligence.

Oh, those poor fools. Because there are other, proven, definitions of success that everybody should ascribe to, right?

>I value my time too much to spend the amount required undoing that confusion

Yep, I expected this part.

The purpose of research is to farm grant money and citations. Any actual learning that happens during the process is beside the point.