In other words, the choice is never "Forge these results, or have no career."
Yes it is, because in order to have a career, it is not enough to just publish. You have to publish in prestigious journals and you have to publish original, groundbreaking, important, and meaningful research.
A tiny percentage of academics actually end up keeping their job until retirement. If you don't plan on perishing, you publish in prestigious journals by whatever means necessary. Whatever. Means. Necessary.
"Accidentally" using bad statistics is the kind of "accident" that gets you tenure. It's significantly easier to forge groundbreaking, important, prestigious research than it is to actually do this research.
Scientific fraud is epidemic precisely because of the economics of universities.
I never saw any researchers or students falsify or make up data, but often I saw experiments performed without defining a hypothesis first. The hypothesis was created a posteriori to match any interesting correlations that could be combed from the data. I felt like I was a marketer trying to find a reason to promote a product. This particular approach might be standard when dealing with in-vivo experiments (on human subjects). It's a time-intensive process and you can't just rerun the experiment like you can on an artificial system. However, I didn't feel like it was the correct way to do research.
There's been renewed interest in recent years of creating a journal of failed experiments for various research areas, but it never seems to catch on. It would be invaluable, but there are too many egotistical people in academia who don't want to be associated with failure in any way.
I think the economics often are perverse, but I think you're doing a disservice to the overall discussion by simplifying it too much.
Just remember that 50 year old profs came of age in a different era.
I am trying to make a point that in the world of vicious competition for grant money, every shitty incremental experiment is lauded as groundbreaking. For very understandable reasons.
I'm being facetious about the way that the key quality of a scientist has shifted from doing and teaching science to being a great marketer who can win grants. The "best" scientists these days are generally the ones who are really great at hype.
I agree there are problems with how science works right now, and I agree on what the problems are. I disagree on the weights of the incentives, though. You describe "rampant" fraud. I have observed none. Then my conclusion is that the claim that fraud is rampant is incorrect.
How hard have you looked and what is your definition of fraud?