Exactly. We owe the present universality of 'peer review' to the post-WWII expansion of government-funded military-industry-university science (see also Vanneva

Exactly. We owe the present universality of 'peer review' to the post-WWII expansion of government-funded military-industry-university science (see also Vannevar Bush): > The idea that any legitimate scientific journal ought to implement a formal referee system began to take hold in the decades following the Second World War...The very phrase 'scientific community' dates from this time. Researchers wanted to preserve autonomy while holding on to the massive government funding that had come their way since the Second World War. Allocations for basic research in the United States, for instance, swelled by a factor of 25 in less than a decade9. 'Peer review' was a term borrowed from the procedures that government agencies used to decide who would receive financial support for scientific and medical research 'Peer review', like citation counts, is essentially bureaucratic: it is the scientific form of 'no one was ever fired for buying IBM'. ('But I relied on a peer-reviewed paper!' goes the cry. You also see this excuse often said by authors of rubbish papers: 'you can't criticize my paper, it's been peer-reviewed!') It is an attempt to resolve the principal-agent problem (exacerbated by the huge increase in numbers of researchers and the prospects of power and wealth now offered by science) by serving as a stamp of 'scientific quality' which is easily externally verifiable by ignorant outsiders such as funders. As such, it is considered indispensable by governments/universities, and it helps build barriers to entry by established publishers like Elsevier. This is why 'peer review', despite the lack of any real evidence and the occasional study showing experimentally that it is an atrocious filter which frequently discriminates against the best research and select for the worst, has throve over the past century.