Dear Art, Let's start with moral outrage and use it to energize a search for a "better way." I of course agree that we use signals, and must, or else we would instantly drown. Prudence is one of the virtues. For example, I use the author signal, as we all do: anything by Art Diamond or Bruno Frey is worth reading. And I do to some (i.e. the exactly optimal) degree use the journal test: I never, for instance, read anything in Econometrica, because I know from long experience that nothing published there makes a scientific contribution to economics--contributions to significance testing, yes, and to theorem proving, sure (you yourself have written most illuminatingly on the very point); but not to science. I've had much better luck reading the Pakistan Development Review. But the actual-reading choice procedure is to read the summary and the first page or so of an actual paper, glancing perhaps over the tables and the bibliography, and then to read the whole thing only if I see signs of economic science going on there. I admire the idea of 4 submitted papers as in Britain. We should do that for promotion and appointment in North America. But what I'd want to have in a stack in front of me would be 100 such papers (that's about all I could handle if I were on such a board) of the typescripts, with names and journals removed. Then I'd grade 'em like student scripts, and go into a meeting with colleagues who had read an overlapping sample as though into a degree meeting in Britain, ready to argue the case for this or that person in serious scientific detail: one or two Firsts; a select bunch of Upper Seconds; more Lower Seconds; a passel of Passes; and a number of Fails---such as the average paper in Econometrica. What's the merit? We would then write for each other, seriously persuasively, as historians on the whole do (because they on the whole read [quickly: see above] whole books of candidates), instead of for the depraved "standards" (as Bruno noted) of anonymous referees with no real stake in the scientific issue, except perhaps to stealthily kill off unusual ideas. Warm regards, Deirdre McCloskey