All of Nicholas Weininger's Comments + Replies
Do we get better or worse at adapting to change?
Slightly tangentially: I have so many questions about that Irish population graph, like:
-- That is a huge population growth rate between 1800 and 1840 before the famine. What was going on there? I graphed it vs a few other European countries and while many of them were growing steadily during that period, nobody else had that high a percentage of growth (54% growth in 40 years if I'm doing the math right) except the UK, which has a crazy quick and apparently unrelated knee upward in the graph in 1810-1820. Was that just a time when both Ireland and the now... (read more)
Research oriented government agencies already sometimes give grants to private organizations (corporations, typically) for largish chunks of work-- climate tech startups get nontrivial amounts of project funding from organizations like NRECA for example. Do these grants work better than grants to PIs? That seems worth finding out. Similar, though less research oriented, is the phenomenon of "Beltway bandit" companies whose revenue comes mostly from defense contracts-- I suspect that for better or worse, the incentive structure faced by grant seeking labs in your proposed model would come to resemble these.