Why would anyone choose to do that instead of making boatloads of money in industry?
But happily I’m working for a big multinational as a corporate drone, so I’m still in a position to say this ;)
For myself, I am interested in logic programming and machine learning. I started a PhD in Inductive Logic Programming, which is machine learning of logic programs from examples. There's no way I could follow this interest in any other structure but a PhD on ILP.
In the industry? I can forget right about it. Even ordinary logic programming is out of the question. Machine learning? That would have to be statistical machine learning that just bores me to death.
In academia I have -so far- the freedom to pursue my actual research interest and all I have to show for it is success in understanding my subject and discovering new knowledge, which is exactly what I want to do anyway.
This sounds like it would have use in industry. You are really saying that it does not?
Some people find a lot more meaning in that than, say, using cutting-edge ML algorithms to optimally place Facebook ads for awful pizza.
That is, academia is at-best dimly related to practical results that have a direct effect on people's lives.
Even in CS, almost all of what I learned in grad school was directly applicable to real problems. The issue is that the bar in industry is so low that we're more worried about getting people to do even basic things than getting them to use state of the art technology.
Rarer in business is one individuals efforts 100% wasted with such regularity.
Academia is a path finding strategy through a forest where most paths are dead-ends.
On a case-by-case, individual basis, it doesn't look so good.
That's just describing hard problem solving in general, it's not specific to academia at all.
Academia as we know it is fairly recent. Many of the fundamental results in the sciences were discovered by people who weren’t academics but had a chill day job. For example, Newton.
Look at how monkeys live, look at us. Think who can do science.
You might find the latter has a lot more to do with our success as a species than "science" as such.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7797776.stm
The difference is that they do business with bananas, primitive tools, sex, etc. While we do business with phones, planes, houses... i.e. things that exist thanks to science.