As Fox Mulder once said, I have plenty of theories :) - Neil Saunders

I love Fox Mulder. He had his priorities right - Deepak Singh

One theory: skills, experience, education are irrelevant. Contribution to "the economy" determines salary. It's hard to measure how scientists in academia contribute to GDP. Let's face it, many of them don't. - Neil Saunders

Because scientists are so much passionate that you can have them work even at very low salaries... so why pay them more? (basic supply and demand stuff...) - Enro

In addition to what Neil said, funding is wasted on the same experiments over and over again. It's not only about five groups working on the same problem today, but also about wasting resources on repeating experiments that were done 10 years ago. As far as I heard, money wasting is included in the science budgets, but that doesn't make measuring impact of science on GDP any easier. - Pawel Szczesny

It's not just scientists. Software Engineers (read MS in Computer Science) are pain $10-20K less that they might make if they were working in industry. They are doing the same kind of work AND getting appreciated much less. You have to really like scientific research to want to enable it in that kind of environment - Deepak Singh

What Enro and Pawel said... - Björn Brembs

Supply and demand? Even now, with the relatively low salary, there are too many scientists (compared to the number of tenured positions). - Michael Kuhn

Pretty much just an echo here. Society doesn't value research appropriately because it's difficult to measure its value -- you need to think and look over long timescales, decades or longer, which people aren't used to doing and political cycles actively discourage our "leaders" (ha!) from doing. The NIH puts out a feeble little pamphlet "why fund science?" every so often, but I don't know of any concerted effort to make a strong business case for research. - Bill Hooker

There is a common belief that science is a noble profession. Society considers those who work in science to be privileged. The privilege conferred on those who can do science is supposed to compensate for lower salaries. - Jack H. Pincus

Jack, unfortunately, I don't see too much privilege given to scientists either these days (at least in the US). - Deepak Singh

You're not in an income-generating field. You're also not generally employed to do something that management wants to get done so they can create a product: you're there because you've got the research bug. - Chris Cotsapas

Interesting to see how people are reading "scientists" as "scientists in academia" ;) Thanks to Chris & Bill for a different perspective… - dK

It's because academic scientists are the ones that are the most underpaid, dekay. Industrial scientists are still underpaid relative to their education level, but nowhere near as bad as academic scientists. - Mr. Gunn

one of my theory that it happen because society & government can not estimate value (impact) of scientific products. It's not electronics or software or food... scientists produce papers!!! No doubt some of them will be translated and find application in medicine or other technologies but most of them not. So income (money that government or other foundations invest to academic science) much more then outcome - benefits for society and highly expected products. - Alexey

People are rewarded ('paid') based on how much 'obvious' (or relevant) contribution or product they make for their society. Scientists are not paid well because their contribution to the society is not really obvious. Their work can be presented in an important way (e.g. fight cancer) - and I think that's how scientists manage to get some money - but the problem is that for what they do, 99% of them do not generally have (or care) about an answer that is of beneficial to the society. Only 1% do. - JWS

(agree with Enro) ...because they - like most artists, actors, musicians, comedians - love/need what they do so much, that they'd probably (and often do) do it for free. - nossenigma from fftogo

I agree with JWS, also, the idea of value is very subjective and with the govt. involved really unpredictable. - Aarthy