academics come up with all the ideas

I'm having an epiphany, and that is academics come up with many - most - all - depending on how hyperbolic I'm being, and as you know I can be quite hyperbolic. I'm reading Bounded Rationality: the adaptive toolbox and although it's in academese (quite good academese, but technical and dense writing), I'm recognizing the ideas as similar to those I read in Blink. Bounded Rationality came out in 2002 from MIT Press, obviously an academic publisher. Blink appeared in 2005 from Little, Brown and Company, a more commercial publisher. But the main idea is the same - that when we make decisions, we aren't optimizing by computing all possible outcomes and computing the return on investment, but rather using a heuristic "educated guess" approach based on experience, intuition, and observing others who are successful.

I'm sure Malcolm Gladwell did his proper citations and all that - but it comes to this - he made a lot of money off of popularizing a concept that essentially is not his. I guess when I say that by researching and writing, we're contributing to the common good, we really are - just not to our own personal common goods. Few of us get rich this way, although we're the thinkers who are really shaping what people talk about. Well, except for when we talk about Jon&Kate+8.