I really hate these lines. Not because capitalism doesn't have loads of problems but rather that it is missing underlying principles and incentives that exist to create these structures and incentives. They are coupled with the economic systems but not strictly dependent on them. These issues aren't fundamentally broken because the privatization nor nationalization of capital resources. Many of these issues exist because of metric hacking which exist due to bureaucratization and politicization. So in that sense it doesn't matter if your society is capitalist, socialist, feudal, monarchistic, anarchistic, or whatever. It has to do with how humans fundamentally organize structures, delegate, and evaluate. It is a crisis of the 21st century because only now have we had such scale and such specialization. But as complexity has been increasing at an exponential rate we are simplifying our metrics and decreasing trust.
The idea that we need to continuously monitor people for performance (measure them), rather than (for example) accept them into a community and just let them evolve there (for better or worse), is very intimately tied to capitalism.
Also, all the KPI systems based on objective metric ignore a really simple metric, that you can simply ask every scientist an opinion (for example, who are the leading people in your field) and use that as a metric, as a recommendation what kind of research is to be financed more and what kind is to be financed less. Again, this is because capitalism cannot trust employees by default, it has to put some other authority in charge of them.
Sure, metric hacking is not a problem when the crux of the matter is actually bending truth to follow the party line or face repercussions. Repercussions that could be years of imprisonment up to death penalty.
A cursory research on "scientific research under communism" yields [0], which seems to line up with the experience from people coming from former communist countries (including Mao's China and some former Eastern European countries).
I am also reminded of Luzin [1]. The previous article does not even mention pure mathematics as falling under repression, but even this domain (which was a strong point of Soviet Russia) could send researchers into concentration camps for dubious political motives.
So yes, metric hacking does not matter when the whole thing is bogus.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Repression_of_science_in_the_S...
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nikolai_Luzin#Luzin_affair_of_...
He was never higher ranking (didn't get professorship) until the 1989 revolution, AFAICT he was more interested in research (thermodynamics) than career.
During real socialism, academia was often a refuge of smart and freethinking people, if you were able to get there (some didn't for political reasons). It wasn't a highly paid job. And it also was very inefficient. There were completely useless departments, and the department heads were political positions. But some good science got done, without having to toe the party line, and without having to bend metrics and having to publish lots of repeated nonsense.
(I am not advocating that particular system, I think it was worse, but I am pointing out that measurement is not inevitable.)
One result of liberal (capitalist) approach to science is that people get really good at marketing themselves. That's why science in the Eastern Europe often gets bad optics, because that self-promoting aspect of it wasn't as prevalent there.
I'd like to make you aware of this little known thing called The 5 Year Plans.
My point is, there existed different systems of doing science, which weren't measured as much (to the extent that would cause overproduction of articles that no scientist has time to read), because they had different preference than "scientific efficacy by an objective metric". For example, preference for somebody being authority in a scientific field for life. Or preference for academia to be a place for outcasts. Or preference for democratic decision making about what to scientifically pursue. These are all non-capitalist preferences.
I hate to break it to you, but not everything is about economics.
I don't recall having heard about the greeks complaining on how they had to fine-tune their treaties for the review board or journal acceptance.
Like my dude quota systems were at the heart of all successful capitalist, socialist, communist, and fascist nations. I can give examples. My man your logic is deeply flawed.
