Yeah, I wondered about the same thing. I have no idea how research works, but naively it seems to me that if you want to implement “finance groups rather than individuals” all you need is to coordinate a group of individuals and make them sign a contract that whatever money one of them gets from a grant will be distributed among the rest equally (or maybe 50% to the person who got the money, and the remaining 50% equally). In other words, group financing can be already implemented on top of individual financing.
And the obvious argument against this is that the people who bring the most money would leave the system, because they would believe they could do better individually? Unless the system is set up so that the imbalances are not too great, and being a member of the system brings benefits that outweigh the net financial loss. For example, the system could provide non-scientists (or not-top-scientists) that would handle the bureaucracy, so that the scientists have more time for their research. It would be as if you pay a secretary, only it is one secretary shared by a number of scientists.
But maybe I am just reinventing a university here?
I really don’t think a group of, say, university professors could join in such a contract. For one, I’m not sure their universities would let them, especially if they weren’t all at the same university. For another, the granting organizations (e.g., NIH) put a lot of restrictions on the grant money. You can’t redistribute it to other labs.
Also, the grants are still going to be small ones to fund a single lab, not large ones that could fund hundreds of researchers. If everyone still has to seek grants you haven’t really solved the problem, even if they are spreading risk/reward somehow.
Yeah, I wondered about the same thing. I have no idea how research works, but naively it seems to me that if you want to implement “finance groups rather than individuals” all you need is to coordinate a group of individuals and make them sign a contract that whatever money one of them gets from a grant will be distributed among the rest equally (or maybe 50% to the person who got the money, and the remaining 50% equally). In other words, group financing can be already implemented on top of individual financing.
And the obvious argument against this is that the people who bring the most money would leave the system, because they would believe they could do better individually? Unless the system is set up so that the imbalances are not too great, and being a member of the system brings benefits that outweigh the net financial loss. For example, the system could provide non-scientists (or not-top-scientists) that would handle the bureaucracy, so that the scientists have more time for their research. It would be as if you pay a secretary, only it is one secretary shared by a number of scientists.
But maybe I am just reinventing a university here?
I really don’t think a group of, say, university professors could join in such a contract. For one, I’m not sure their universities would let them, especially if they weren’t all at the same university. For another, the granting organizations (e.g., NIH) put a lot of restrictions on the grant money. You can’t redistribute it to other labs.
Also, the grants are still going to be small ones to fund a single lab, not large ones that could fund hundreds of researchers. If everyone still has to seek grants you haven’t really solved the problem, even if they are spreading risk/reward somehow.