Einstein worked in a patent office from 1902-1909. In 1905 he published four papers on the photoelectric effect (laying the way for quantum physics), Brownian motion (proving the existence of atoms), special relativity, and the equivalence of mass and energy (leading to atomic energy).
From the beginning Einstein wanted to be a teacher and had little interest in money. Has money suddenly become more important to everyone?
Quite possibly, or dare I say probably. The amount of available products and experiences one could purchase with more money was significantly smaller in Einstein's time than today. I think it'd be quite a reasonable hypothesis to posit the explosion of consumerism coupled with the everything everywhere effects of online life have caused folks to be considerably more aware of, and interested, monetary gain.
How often people could afford a home and basic necessities for a family (including stability) without focusing on money back then? And how often can people afford those now without focusing on money?
It is very, very likely that it has.
Check out career fairs at "top" universities. Kids are clamoring to get into IB and Consulting and giant tech companies. Legions of the best and brightest are literally just chasing prestige and dollars. I mean the number of MIT Math/Physics/CS/etc PhDs alone that go on to do Quant finance is dizzying and should make people think twice about our current society and how it incentivizes work.
It's pretty simple, why go on the Academic Research Post-Doc -> Faculty grind to make relative peanuts when you can walk into a hedge fund and make 300k+ your first year out of your phd?
Maybe the answer is that we have become more effective at detecting and monetizing genius; Einstein might have languished for the rest of his life if he were less driven. Or maybe it's the opposite; we don't give smart people enough time or money without draining them of the time to work on novel discovery. Or both at once.
1905 was very different from 1705. It was not particularly different from today, aside from cars, planes and computers. Hell, it was a golden age of physics research and incredibly well respected. The men and woman of the fifth Solvay conference [1], Emmy Noether and all the incredible mathematicians of the time- most of them did not come from means and could hardly be described as aristocrats.
> Now you have to be a “professional” or endorsed by one.
No, you just pay the publishing fee.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Solvay_conference_1927.jp...
More evidence: people literally write songs about wanting/making money and this is acceptable in our culture. We live in a disgusting age.
There is this narrative parroted by the ultra-rich and corporations that life is much more livable for the poor in the modern era (because we have microwaves), but that is simply not true.
I feel like a large portion of the brightest may have always sold out, maybe Einstein was just obsessed with a particular problem enough to chase that an avoid the more lucrative but pointless problems.
It is that in the past a large portion of the world's brightest were working in the fields or fishing or mining or making bowls or adding up numbers as a clerk.
What? The number of PhD grads far outstrips the number of tenure track positions available in any given year. Far more than in the past. Not only that but people routinely need to do multiple post docs to even have a chance at an interview and even as recently as the 1950s one could get a tenure position without a single post doc and sometimes without any published work outside their dissertation.
Perhaps! But is the smartest AI researcher / quant / etc. smarter than the average astronomer? The fact that so many of the smartest people in our generation go into these fields is surely bringing the average down in the hard sciences.