> anyone who can succeed in academia almost certainly has the brains and credentials to get a decent non-academic job.

I suspect the way this usually gets started is similar to embezzlement schemes. “Oh I’ll just borrow a few dollars from the till and pay it back tomorrow” is akin to “The manuscript is due tonight so I’ll just touch up this microphotograph to look like the other one that had bad focus.”

That escalates into forging invoices on the one hand and completely fabricated data on the other. By that point they’re in too deep to stop until they get caught.

Because, for one thing, some people are shitty frauds, and they're not bothered by it. Those people see messed-up incentives as an opportunity.

Do serious workers tend to get out of the field, if the incentives are wrongheaded enough? Sure. Some. Does that fix the incentives or the outcomes within that field? No, not at all.

>because anyone who can succeed in academia almost certainly has the brains and credentials to get a decent non-academic job.

That's not obviously true at all.

Because it's not a requirement, and most people are not intentionally or accidentally defrauding the government.

The issue is that there is no incentive to do the additional work necessary to generate reproducible results because of the pressure to constantly generate sufficiently novel results to publish.

If you spend the additional time required to have fully reproducible results and your competition is not, you're probably going to lose the game (where the game is obtaining more funding).

Not generating reproducible results doesn't mean you're a fraud, but the absence of a requirement to generate them in order to publish means that it's easier for fraudsters to operate that it would be with that requirement.