who is going to pay them more? institutions? do you think that institutions are acting against their own incentives somehow? institutions are acting on their incentives and it's producing suboptimal outcomes for society because spoiler alert the free market isn't the correct mechanism for absolutely everything in life.
Fixing the incentives might, however funding comes from very few places and they have their own incentives => lobbied goals or profit-motivated.
One might argue that money is a prioritization method.
I'd argue that having one metric (amount of money) makes you susceptible to single-metric problems: optimization of everything to the point of meaninglessness, critical dependence on the stability of that metric's underlying present & future value.
Defects in the currently implemented financial system (exploitable by evolving technologies) might lead to larger systematic failures and less robustness.
Politics doesn't mean anything, money. Academia is starting to mean less, money. Culture is mostly, money. Health care is having serious issues, money. Military industrial is having issues, money. Even farming is having issues, money.