As an aside, I've worked with plenty of academics and while I sometimes thought their research area was stupidly low stakes, the only researchers that I thought were truly wasting time were the ones that had to do research for a medical degree. Basically forced research.
Now I went to a premier university and I'm friends with some smart cookies, but I don't buy for a second the overall theme of this comment chain. There is a reason the West is incredibly wealthy and it isn't because our best and brightest are faking it.
The reasons for that can be myriad. Actual or false scientific success of the last 30 years is not necessarily it.
Also, don't you feel the ship has kind of been slowly going down during the last 10 years, wealth-wise ?
Not for the rich, so the reasons are not that much to do with value-creation (it's value distribution that's rotten).
IMHO, there is also a tremendous amount of value dilution going on, and not just due to the action of the US FED or Treasury, or other central banks.
The problems are systemic and global, and conjoined with the problem of value distribution.
That said, I have also witnessed plenty of low-level fraud: changing of dates to match documentation, discarding "outlier" samples without justification or even documentation, etc. Definitely enough to totally invalidate a result in some cases.
Yes but we’re talking about academics.