I meant to cover that in the last (parenthesized) sentence or my post. There will always be incentives in a broad sense, but it is not necessary to “incentivize

I meant to cover that in the last (parenthesized) sentence or my post. There will always be incentives in a broad sense, but it is not necessary to “incentivize” people via official productivity metrics. Academics used to figure out who to promote without creating a rush for everyone to publish as much as possible, or to maximize other gameable metrics. I don’t kid myself that there was ever a golden era of true academic meritocracy, but there really did used to be less of an obsession with silly metrics, and a greater exercise of individual judgment.