[timkam]

> performance doesn't matter for the staff to be paid.

That's not the case for the people who are in the key phase of establishing themselves as academics and who are generally not on permanent contracts. And for tenured staff, performance decides access to resources that may be as mundane as one's own research time. Conversely, the problem is a mix of extremely shallow performance metrics and a paper-pusher system in which most people get bogged down by bureaucracy by the time they get tenure (or even earlier). This means that very few people have the peace of mind that allows them to focus on high-risk fundamental research. In European AI and CS, I would claim that the ones who manage to maintain focus essentially do this in their free time and get little reward for this; the alternative, i.e., building a strong franchise, is more rewarding in terms of performance metrics.