How can lap dancers increase their incomes?

One of the Ig Nobel winners announced yesterday looked at this very question.

ECONOMICS PRIZE. Geoffrey Miller, Joshua Tybur and Brent Jordan of the University of New Mexico, USA, for discovering that a professional lap dancer's ovulatory cycle affects her tip earnings. REFERENCE: "Ovulatory Cycle Effects on Tip Earnings by Lap Dancers: Economic Evidence for Human Estrus?" Geoffrey Miller, Joshua M. Tybur, Brent D. Jordan, Evolution and Human Behavior, vol. 28, 2007, pp. 375-81

Such research and publications are triggered by the stupidly insane approach in universities that we characterize as "publish or perish." So, hey, such research is a rational response to an irrational system.

I wrote about this in an essay that was published in the Chronicle Review, back in 2001. In that, I wrote:

Last summer, I literally shouted "Aha!" in the middle of one night as I read the following sentences in Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, in which the title character yells at a retired professor: "All our thoughts and feelings pertained to you alone. Our days were spent talking of you and your work, we were proud of you, we uttered your name with reverence, our nights were wasted reading books and magazines for which I now have the deepest contempt! ... But now my eyes have been opened! I see everything! You write about art, but you understand nothing of art! All your works, which I used to love, are not worth a copper kopeck. You've swindled us!"

The passage from Uncle Vanya reminded me of the public, whose taxes make it possible for universities like mine to exist. Would people be disillusioned if they knew that only a few of professors' publications are ever read by more than a handful of other scholars? Would people be disappointed in higher education if they realized that most academics' publications would not sell even for a penny? Would people agree with Uncle Vanya that professors who write but are rarely read and cited are swindlers? Could it be that people already grasp the truth, and that their knowledge is one cause of the decline in the prestige our society accords to faculty members? If I did not teach at a university, would I agree with Uncle Vanya?