You're assuming that the point of academia is that it is valuable to society.
The point of academia (from a purist's perspective, at least) is that learning is the target in itself; pushing back the boundaries of ignorance is an end-goal of our species.
In many cases the advancement of our state of knowledge brings many rewards but that doesn't have to be the point of it.
> Maybe I am wrong but after postmodernism I really don't see what new revelations are going to be of fundamental value to society.
I'm not sure postmodernism has any fundamental value to society! But of course we can't reason about how much value new advances have to society - if we knew enough about them to know that, they would already have been discovered.
Well not really. There is a reason why learning into itself have value and thats exactly because it benefit society which is why governments have paid for it historically.
But if you want to study alchemy you have to do it on your own. My point is that perhaps philosophy and psychology and economics now belongs to that group.
Well yes really. You might disagree but I think a society that knows what Pluto looks like (for example) is a better society than one that doesn't, even if that knowledge does not make that civilisation any materially better off.
The point of academia (from a purist's perspective, at least) is that learning is the target in itself; pushing back the boundaries of ignorance is an end-goal of our species.
In many cases the advancement of our state of knowledge brings many rewards but that doesn't have to be the point of it.
> Maybe I am wrong but after postmodernism I really don't see what new revelations are going to be of fundamental value to society.
I'm not sure postmodernism has any fundamental value to society! But of course we can't reason about how much value new advances have to society - if we knew enough about them to know that, they would already have been discovered.