Hello! You’re receiving this newsletter as one of 3,206 subscribers (+228 from last week, big week).

Thank you to everyone who helped bring new readers to our newsletter last week and who subscribed from our most recent video.

You’ll find the “Share the Newsletter” feature at the end of the current issue. Today’s newsletter contains 694 words, and reading it in full takes about 4 minutes.

For as little as €180, you can have your name listed as the author of a peer-reviewed scientific paper.

You don't have to design the study, collect the data, or write a single word. All you need to do is pay, and your name goes on research that gets submitted to an academic journal, passes the reviews and gets published as legitimate science.

This is what paper mills do. They’re businesses — actual, functioning businesses with websites, customer service, and pricing tiers — that manufacture fake academic research for paying clients.

One Russia-linked operation based in Latvia — which has a website, and yes, testimonials — claims to have published more than 12,650 articles since 2012. And globally, it’s estimated that up to 400,000 paper mill articles have infiltrated scientific literature over the past two decades.

To understand why this market exists, you have to understand the incentive structure that accidentally created it.

Academic journals, particularly open-access ones, charge article processing fees. They make money every time a paper is published, so more papers means more revenue.

Researchers, meanwhile, need publications to secure grants, advance their careers, and reach senior positions. The phrase is publish or perish, and it isn’t an exaggeration. So naturally, someone built a business around it.

And to make sure their papers keep getting through, some operate like a cartel, bribing journal editors with payments up to $20,000 to guarantee publication.

Now, all of this might sound like a problem for scientists and journal editors to sort out among themselves. And it would be, if governments around the world weren't collectively spending $2.9 trillion on research and development every year, most of it guided by published research.

If a meaningful share of that research is fabricated, the capital flowing behind it is being misallocated at scale. Drug companies invest billions developing treatments based on fabricated studies, while government agencies fund research agendas built on compromised foundations.

The pharmaceutical and biotech industries, which rely more heavily on published science than almost any other sector, are particularly exposed.

Academic inventors contributed to more than a quarter of all medicines approved between 2001 and 2019, and more than a third of all cancer treatments. Developing a single approved drug costs the industry over $5 billion once you account for all the failed candidates along the way, most of which fail in the preclinical phase guided largely by published research. If that research can't be trusted, the capital behind it can't be either.

And the problem compounds, because fraudulent papers get cited by other papers, which get cited by others, so the contamination spreads through the literature long after the original fabrication. Retraction, when it happens, rarely catches up with the citations already embedded downstream.

Underneath all of this is something economists don't always talk about but probably should: trust as an economic resource.

Scientific credibility is a form of institutional trust, and trust has real economic value. It’s what allows a pension fund to back a biotech startup, a government to approve a new drug, a hospital to adopt a new treatment protocol.

When that trust erodes, so does everything built on top of it.

The paper mill industry has been estimated to be worth around $10 million globally. That sounds almost trivially small next to the trillions of R&D spending it’s quietly corrupting. Which is, in its own way, the most unsettling part of the story.

The median household income in the United States is roughly $83,000 a year. That's supposed to mean a comfortable, stable, middle-class life.

But for a growing number of American families, it doesn't feel that way.

In our latest video, we look at why, starting with the number the US government uses to define poverty.

We also look at one of the most quietly destructive features of the American welfare system, where earning more money can leave families worse off than before. And at what the pandemic accidentally revealed about how much of the modern household budget isn't really spending at all.

Yes, by most measures, Americans are getting richer. So why does a stable life keep feeling further out of reach?