From Jacobin Magazine: “When the competitive dictates of capitalism — selling your labor if you’re a worker, maximizing profit if you’re a boss — reign over all else, alternative pursuits are inevitably thwarted, no matter how noble. A noble purpose of the science academy, for example, is to provide the resources and encouragement for people to carry out rigorous experiments that will enhance collective knowledge about the world we live in. But those aspirations suffer as austerity-minded administrations stem the tide of federal funding for universities and research, and institutions react by changing their funding models to stay afloat.
Edwards and Roy observe that hypercompetition caused by the proliferation of performance metrics causes academic scientists to emphasize quantity over quality, incentivizes them to cut corners, and selects for the most career-minded rather than science-minded scholars. In short, the dictates of the capitalist market (‘competition, accumulation, profit-maximization, and increasing labour-productivity’) hurt scientific integrity and the collective pursuit of knowledge.”
