OP's point is that its hard to get funds to conduct 9 studies per year with hope that 3 will result in paper as expected from the tenure track. I neither have intention to counter argument nor I have insights in to specific field that author is working on (which seems to be anthropology). My argument is exactly more broader as you have mentioned: Lot of research - at least as captured by media - involves simply doing some statistical survey and getting comfortable p-value to suggest some weird correlation. There is a lot of money spent in this type of "research" because it is expensive to conduct such studies. My objection purely on calling this "science" and calling people doing this as "scientists" because these two fairly reputable words are being used to lure general public to believe such "studies". I feel such works should be called "surveys" and people doing it should be called "surveyors". The real scientific work should involve taking the survey only as a hint and then uncover actual mechanism that falsifiably proves or disproves the correlation with hopefully more predictions. Simple surveys don't have these properties and hence such studies shouldn't be labeled as work of scientists.