Regarding all the examples of “serendipitous” discoveries that later proved so valuable, I want to propose an analogy.
Consider consumer surplus. This is when the price you would be willing to pay is higher than the price that you do pay, so you incur less cost for the same benefit. While I have not read this description of it explicitly, I put it to you that when it later transpires that the benefit was greater than you originally expected, this is also consumer surplus.
With that idea in mind, turn now to the grant issuing process and consider how those are awarded; in particular things like peer review and grant requirements seem driven more by avoiding wasting money than they are by acquiring knowledge. It feels to me like the current system is designed explicitly to reduce the scientific equivalent of consumer surplus to zero as a consequence.
Since I am otherwise confident that scientific research doesn’t resemble a market very closely, I further expect this does not reflect having reached equilibrium. Therefore this lack of surplus seems strictly bad.
Regarding all the examples of “serendipitous” discoveries that later proved so valuable, I want to propose an analogy.
Consider consumer surplus. This is when the price you would be willing to pay is higher than the price that you do pay, so you incur less cost for the same benefit. While I have not read this description of it explicitly, I put it to you that when it later transpires that the benefit was greater than you originally expected, this is also consumer surplus.
With that idea in mind, turn now to the grant issuing process and consider how those are awarded; in particular things like peer review and grant requirements seem driven more by avoiding wasting money than they are by acquiring knowledge. It feels to me like the current system is designed explicitly to reduce the scientific equivalent of consumer surplus to zero as a consequence.
Since I am otherwise confident that scientific research doesn’t resemble a market very closely, I further expect this does not reflect having reached equilibrium. Therefore this lack of surplus seems strictly bad.