You've diagnosed the issue then recommended leaches and bleeding.
'Market mechanisms' already exist - no company is precluded from doing research. We can discuss the deficit in research investment that short termist 'market mechanisms' have led to in contemporary corporations, but its absurd to claim that the market can or should replace academic research.
It's pretty clear that in practice the 'publish or perish' academic culture fostered by the financialisation of the university, the rise of the adjunct and the death of tenure have contributed heavily to the falsification of research. In practice encouraging replication, self directed research and significantly more 'pure' 'blue sky' research than governments and universities are inclined to do, would significantly alleviate this problem.
Academia needs far less exposure to 'market mechanisms'. They're perverse incentives for good science.
To say there's a deficit in research spending pre-supposes there's a correct absolute level of resource allocation that is easily discoverable. But the reason we need markets in the first place is that governments aren't able to discover the right levels of resource allocation on their own. That's why the USSR ended up with lots of steel foundries but no software companies, nor even any competitor to the internet.
If anything research is clearly over-funded right now, especially in some fields like medical research. That's why so many scientists turn to fraud in desperation. There just aren't enough genuine discoveries to go round.
> encouraging replication, self directed research and significantly more 'pure' 'blue sky' research
Replication is the opposite of self directed blue sky research, so how do you suggest it be encouraged whilst simultaneously reducing the power of the money givers even further? BTW, many bogus papers will replicate whilst still being wrong. Replicability is not a synonym for good science.
Really, this is a very common claim that needs to go away. The solution to fraud and incompetence is not to give incompetent fraudsters even more freedom and money.
> But the reason we need markets in the first place is that governments aren't able to discover the right levels of resource allocation on their own.
Markets don't discover "the right" (i.e. social welfare maximizing) resource allocation, they discover, under ideal conditions, a pareto-optimal allocation. This is a very weak condition: "Jeff Bezos owns everything" is pareto-optimal. You need redistribution if you want to turn that into a socially optimal one.
In realistic conditions, they don't even do that: market mechanisms will reliably underinvest in things with positive externalities, and the larger the externality the greater the degree of misallocation. The positive externalities of research are enormous compared to the value captured by the researchers.
'Market mechanisms' already exist - no company is precluded from doing research. We can discuss the deficit in research investment that short termist 'market mechanisms' have led to in contemporary corporations, but its absurd to claim that the market can or should replace academic research.
It's pretty clear that in practice the 'publish or perish' academic culture fostered by the financialisation of the university, the rise of the adjunct and the death of tenure have contributed heavily to the falsification of research. In practice encouraging replication, self directed research and significantly more 'pure' 'blue sky' research than governments and universities are inclined to do, would significantly alleviate this problem.
Academia needs far less exposure to 'market mechanisms'. They're perverse incentives for good science.