alt Hacker NewsAlmost as if capitalism makes everything into a market, and the profits make it self sustaining.
How many will see the connections between this and our capitalist mode of production? Probably few since modern lit/news is allergic to systemic analysis.
The blatant flaws of capitalism can't be ignored for much longer.
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What I get from this is that the professional academic community -- as a whole -- has hit critical mass, which has produced a cottage industry of paper mills and fraudulent services to support said surplus.
Socialism wouldn't be the answer to this because socialism is famous for struggling with surpluses and shortages. All socialism would do is clamp down (hard) on academic's, which case you wind up with the famous shortage where not enough PHD's are available to produce research for an industry.
And that's not a problem specific to just socialism, that's the fallacy of central-planning. The US government clamped down on welfare fraud and the result were freak government social workers sniffing people's bed sheets and rooting through drawers and forcing everyone to document partners.
This is the situation where there needs to be a market correction because the alternative could be far worse.
All people in my extended family were Soviet scientists and engineers from multiple fields, and outside of experimental physics it was the same or worse. Same publish or perish pressure, same amount of fraud and lack of reproducibility. A ton of papers were made up. My father's lab lead was an absolute fraud (biochemistry), everybody knew that, and my father was unable to speak up until the late 90's.
When I was a kid I thought it was the issue with USSR rotting to the core (it was), but when it crashed and later when the web appeared, it became obvious that it's a common problem with academia and its incentives.