> But I still think you unnecessarily brought in a red herring by bringing up economic systems and I could have responded more appropriately. But I didn't brou

> But I still think you unnecessarily brought in a red herring by bringing up economic systems and I could have responded more appropriately. But I didn't brought economic systems into it, others did. I was drawing on my own father's personal experience (as well my observations from the transition) in academia, which is that the metrization is not an inevitability for doing (even good) science. Anyway, I also admitted the system's flaws. Again, I have heard the stories (BTW, the communism wasn't black and white either, different countries had different problems, even in Czechoslovakia there were about 4 different periods during 40 years of communism). I don't know what system China uses internally to measure scientific output. Perhaps they adopted the Western system based on free market competition of scientific institutes for grants and students, and that's why they are also gaming the metrics. In that sense, their current system is based on capitalism. Addendum: I would say since free market competition for labor is the main distinguishing feature of capitalism (together with its dual - private ownership of capital), it's not surprising that such a system is most prone to gaming this competition. It also manifests in the economy at large as "bullshit jobs". There are other parallels of current organizational problems in science with current form of neoliberal capitalism - rise of large actors (for example universities that are single-mindedly focused on publishing at the expense of everything else), abusing precarious labor (for example treatment of PHD students), etc.