What's wrong with poor performance leading to poverty? There seem to be too many scientists, at least publishing too many papers. Wouldn't it be better if a subset of them quit and did more productive work instead. That would also ease the pressure on publication and fraud for the remaining ones.
I don't believe there are really hero superstars in science. Sure, there's a gradient of ability, but just because you happened to be the first one to discover something important doesn't mean you'll always be the best at future discoveries. There must be a lot that depends on the environment they work in.
The rate of scientific progress is roughly proportional to the number of working scientists. People might have other value judgements, but I don't think science is progressing nearly fast enough.
We've been trying hard to cure cancer for decades, with significant progress but we haven't cut the death rate even in half yet. We can't get people to Mars. Phones still need batteries charged every day or two. Most cars still burn fossil fuels. We don't have clean, safe, nuclear power. We don't understand nearly everything about how the brain works, and millions of people suffer from poorly controlled mental illnesses. We don't have household robots to cook and clean. It takes a whole day to get to the other side of the world.
These are all bottlenecked by science. 2x more scientists would result in substantial improvements in daily life within a decade. 10x would be better.
Science has both diminishing and accelerating returns. Diminishing because of duplication of effort, accelerating because large projects need lots of people. 1 scientist can't build a LIGO detector in any number of years. Across all the disciplines, linear seems like a good approximation.
"What's wrong with poor performance leading to poverty?"
- It incentivizes fraud.
If the only way to avoid a McDonald-level job is a ground-breaking paper, you'll be willing to fake that ground-breaking paper, especially since if you're caught, you can still get the McDonald-level job sooner or later.
I am referring to a lot of current conditions, where adjunct professorships are paid at close to bare survival wages and "superstars" get substantial compensation.
I don't believe there are really hero superstars in science. Sure, there's a gradient of ability, but just because you happened to be the first one to discover something important doesn't mean you'll always be the best at future discoveries. There must be a lot that depends on the environment they work in.