Social value of academia

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This page evaluates on the social value consideration for academia as a career option.

Your measure of the social value of academia depends to some extent on how you define social value, but the general conclusion is that academia passes the social value test only in one of these two cases:

You are really good at it, so that you can change the paradigm of thinking.
The discipline you are picking has high social value, so that every minor contribution there counts for a lot.

Social value from the perspective of frontier academic progress as a merit good

One perspective is that pushing forward the frontiers of human knowledge is, in and of itself, valuable, even if the material is not applied. Such a perspective might justify the study of branches of pure mathematics that seem unrelated to any applications. If you take this view, academia is a more attractive option than if you do not. However, the following need to be kept in mind:

Some academic disciplines have been critiqued for not meeting the criteria for human knowledge, in so far as academic publications in these are highly subjective and do not represent clear progress in knowledge.
In many disciplines, a large fraction of progress is by a few people. For instance, Newton, Einstein, and the people who came up with quantum mechanics made an outsized contribution to the subject. It is hard to know in advance who those few people would be, but it seems in general that being substantially better than other academics at the early stage is probably a necessary but not sufficient condition.
Even academics who are capable of excellent work often need to spend a lot of time pushing out a large number of mediocre publications due to the publish or perish pressures while young, and they may be too tired to do original work by the time they have tenure.

Social value from the perspective of impact on the world

The following need to be kept in mind:

A number of disciplines, including many branches of mathematics, have advanced far, far ahead of anything that might be of practical relevance, and further progress in these is unlikely to be of use. However, a counterpoint is that a number of mathematical techniques that were considered to not have much application have been quite important: differential geometry was useful in relativity, matrices and linear algebra were important in physics, statistics, and eventually all the natural and social sciences, and number theory is critically important to much of modern cryptography. There is considerable debate on whether current work in mathematics will be similarly useful later, but the evidence currently does not seem to be strongly in favor.
Even for disciplines that are in principle of practical relevance, the theoretical questions considered in academia are often orthogonal to the manner in which those disciplines would be relevant. For instance, many questions asked in philosophy are relevant to practical ethics, but the mode of discourse of philosophy is unlikely to settle these questions. However, this may be more a question of it taking time for the insights to percolate into the real world. Many deep theoretical insights from statistics and economics have percolated into the general intelligentsia from as recently as 30 years ago.
There are huge differences between academic disciplines in terms of both the expected impact and the variance in impact. For instance, for disciplines such as biomedical research, it can be argued that every bit of research helps at the margin, by investigating and eliminating particular research pathways. In a discipline such as theoretical physics, coming across a fundamental insight comparable to quantum mechanics would revolutionize the subject, but most work is likely to have zero impact.