I don't know the world of drug dealing. But I can say that this article's point of view on academia is mostly wrong. I am myself doing a PhD right now, and I know a lot of people who have done PhDs, who are currently PhD students, or who are going to be in the coming years (before starting my PhD I was in a school/uni, the École normale supérieure, in which almost 90% of the students do a PhD since the school's goal is to train future researchers). The reasons to go for this career paths are not money or wealth at all. Not at all. People chose this path because they love physics / philosophy / computer science / literature / math / history… And because they value freedom above many other things, among which money clearly is.
Doing a PhD is fun and interesting, and that's the main reason to go with it.
The pay during the PhD is indeed not good compared to what we could make by working in the industry, but it's not that bad: we certainly make more than we would by working at MacDonald's (I don't think it is a relevant comparison but that's the example at the beginning of the article).
We do a PhD because we enjoy our life with it right now, and because we want to do research (and possibly teaching at uni level) as our job later, without thinking about the salary (some PhD students don't even really know what are the salaries in academia, only that it's not as much as in the industry).
The position of a PhD student have nothing that is comparable to the drug dealing field as described in the article. It's sometimes hard, but it's not risky/dangerous and you're not exploited by your hierarchy, or have to fear it in any way.
[EDIT to clarify my point] There's is no trade-off such as "I'll take risks and live poorly for now in the hope of becoming rich and famous later" when you choose to do a PhD. If you get to do a PhD, you already have what you want, which is freedom to work on the subject that interests you, very flexible work-hours, the possibility of teaching if you want to (and have some more money for that, which is a nice plus but I guess most PhD students who teach would do it anyway). [/EDIT]
I recently wrote a blogpost which did not get any traction here [1], in which I present a quick overview of my PhD work until now in the hope of showing how much I'm enjoying myself as a PhD student :-), and this in order to try to balance a bit the tendency that HN has to present PhD as a waste of time or generally with negative connotations.
I'm glad you're happy about your education, but to be clear: you don't actually speak representatively for all PhD students.
Although I enjoyed many parts of my PhD experience, and the subsequent Postdoc, I rarely harboured (after my first year of grad school when I saw how competitive faculty positions are) the belief that my PhD (from a competitive school in a hot area) would allow me to work on anything I wanted for a reasonable salary.
I will say this: PhDs go a long way to maximizing freedom, but they are not a panacea. Positions for research are typically quite limited, and it's more likely, you'll end up a terminal "Research Associate" (little pay or autonomy) or working in an Industrial Lab (which has its own plusses and minuses).
Maybe it's very different where you live than in France, but what you say clearly isn't true here. For more than the top 1% gets real freedom. Getting into CNRS or Inria or other public research institutes is hard because it's very competitive, but it's not impossible. And then there are positions at universities which are reputed to be less hard to get (depending on the uni, of course) since there are more of them.
Concerning the pay, I question what you call "little". Salaries in public research institutes in France may be little compared to what you could make at a good position in the industry and given your diplomas, but it's certainly not a bad salary in the sense that you can live off of it with reasonable comfort.
Dekhn is calling you out on your qualitative statements: where you live, in your field, in your own mind and to the people you know ("I know a lot of people who have done PhDs") these facts may indeed be true. But I would argue that it's not true elsewhere, such as in the US across scientific disciplines.
The research of Paula Stephan covers the economic decisions made by US science research institutions[1]. Her hypothesis is that academia maximizes PhD student numbers while the number of tenure-track faculty positions decline. This presents an untenable situation in the long term, where a flood of researchers with PhDs will be unable to find permanent employment, and yet the demand for cheap labor filled by PhD students intensifies.
As you can imagine, this type of trend can be terrifying to some PhD students, despite the "freedom" that their research allows. A lack of job security makes one question their salary as an extension of their worth.
And what do you do when you have finished your PhD? Only a very small fraction of the people with PhD have a chance to get a permanent position in academia, and end up looking for jobs in the industry and realizes that they are both missing some skills and are overqualified for most jobs.
I intend to continue in academia, but in my lab for instance most of the PhD students want to go to the industry after their PhD. Our field, implementation security, is very practical and clearly skew the answer to this question. But it's to say that not all people starting a PhD do so with the intent of working in academia after that.
I agree with most of your post, but also keep in mind that PhDs are a bit different in Europe than they are in the US. Competition is much higher in the US, and the points raised in the article apply to the US definitely more than they do to Europe.
I think this is worth noting - especially in the UK, where PhDs are 3-4 years on top of a 3-4 year undergraduate. I think this shorter PhD length means that there's less opportunity to be exploited as cheap labour, and more opportunity to finish up and leave while you're still young if you ultimately decide that academia isn't for you, as a lot of people I know are. I might not stay in academia, but I won't regret doing it -- I enjoyed the challenge, the people, and doing my little bit for science. I can imagine being a bit more bitter if I was still doing my PhD a few more years down the line.
Doing a PhD is fun and interesting, and that's the main reason to go with it.
The pay during the PhD is indeed not good compared to what we could make by working in the industry, but it's not that bad: we certainly make more than we would by working at MacDonald's (I don't think it is a relevant comparison but that's the example at the beginning of the article).
We do a PhD because we enjoy our life with it right now, and because we want to do research (and possibly teaching at uni level) as our job later, without thinking about the salary (some PhD students don't even really know what are the salaries in academia, only that it's not as much as in the industry).
The position of a PhD student have nothing that is comparable to the drug dealing field as described in the article. It's sometimes hard, but it's not risky/dangerous and you're not exploited by your hierarchy, or have to fear it in any way.
[EDIT to clarify my point] There's is no trade-off such as "I'll take risks and live poorly for now in the hope of becoming rich and famous later" when you choose to do a PhD. If you get to do a PhD, you already have what you want, which is freedom to work on the subject that interests you, very flexible work-hours, the possibility of teaching if you want to (and have some more money for that, which is a nice plus but I guess most PhD students who teach would do it anyway). [/EDIT]
I recently wrote a blogpost which did not get any traction here [1], in which I present a quick overview of my PhD work until now in the hope of showing how much I'm enjoying myself as a PhD student :-), and this in order to try to balance a bit the tendency that HN has to present PhD as a waste of time or generally with negative connotations.
[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6755727