It's really Goodhart's law, but operating on the bases of a system. Corruption acts to benefit, not to cost, so it tends to target upward. My sense is the more

It's really Goodhart's law, but operating on the bases of a system. Corruption acts to benefit, not to cost, so it tends to target upward. My sense is the more out of the ordinary you get, the less likely what you're seeing is reflecting normal merit process. That's usually interpreted to mean unusual levels of merit, but I think it also means what you're seeing is not genuine merit. What tends to be lost in these stories is what you're not hearing. For every fake study, there's probably many more things going on with many more people. There was some paper posted the last couple of days about estimating rates of corruption in financial firms. It would be interesting to apply similar methods to academics.