"Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great justification. You become a low trust society by allowing trust to deteriorate. That happens in part because you choose not to punish people who violate that trust in the first place.
I am not wishy-washy on punishment. A part of me that I do not deny nor suppress wants punishment for those who do wrong.
But sometimes punishments are counter-productive. The easiest example is the death penalty for heinous, non-murder crimes. This incentivizes the rapist or child molester (or whatever) to kill the victim. You can't execute them twice, after all, so if they're already on the hook for a death penalty crime, murdering their victim also gets rid of a prime witness who could get them the death penalty by testifying, but without increasing the odds of the death penalty.
"Career death penalty" here is like that.
>"Well there's lots of people now" is not really a great justification.
It wasn't meant to be a justification. It was an explanation of the problem, and (in part, at least) and attempt to show that things need to change if we want the fraud to go away.
>You become a low trust society by allowing trust to deteriorate
We've been a low trust society for a long time now. People need to start thinking about how to accomplish the long, slow process of changing a low trust society to a high trust one.
Although trust has been decreasing, the US remains a high-trust society compared to the global average.
The core problem is that most people define their self-worth by their employment, and no matter what, this is all going to crash hard due to automation. The generation currently in power is doing everything they can to deny and downplay what is about to happen, instead of helping our societies prepare.
We're all being thrown into the rat race, it is being told to us verbally and in personal experience that there is no alternative than to become the top dog at all costs because that will be the only chance to survive once automation truly hits home. The result is that those who have the feeling they have failed the rat race and have no hope of catching up withdraw from the "societal contract" and just do whatever they want, at the expense of others if need be.
The fact is, we don’t want these people in academia at all. You want researchers who are naturally inclined not to fabricate data, not people who only play by the rules because they think they’re otherwise going to get caught.