No I meant basic research.
Academia justifies itself by claiming it's necessary to do "basic", "foundational", "fundamental" or "blue sky" research in a non-commercial setting, because supposedly corporations can't afford to do long term research that doesn't have immediate application. So in this model academic scientists develop a foundation of firm and rigorous theory about how nature works, publish a literature on it for the good of all mankind, and then shorter term applied research is done by companies to derive practical insights from that literature.
That model doesn't seem right, because there are lots of corporate research programmes into fundamental theory that were/are lavishly funded despite a decade+ of no ROI, most obviously at the moment AI. But let's put that aside and pretend it's true.
Problem is that humanities and social studies don't produce a body of theory on which anything can be built. Humanities produces only critical theory, which despite the name is more like a belief system than a scientific theory. The social studies produce a lot of that too, but even outside critical theory their output is just a giant pile of random thought bubbles and mini-studies to try and prove them. There's nothing much linking these studies, no frameworks that make reliable new predictions. Instead we get an endless stream of Just So claims that fall apart when people try to replicate them, but even failure to replicate doesn't have any impact because there's nothing underneath them to be invalidated. At most it's shown that this one specific paper isn't reliable.
Contrast to something like physics where the work of academic theorists is all about coming up with unified theories of everything, which could then be used to develop practical applications. Einstein is super famous because he invalidated large swathes of theory and opened up space for new theory to be developed. Social studies don't have any equivalent to Einstein and can't by design.