Comment by IG_Semmelweiss
7 hours ago
>>>The grant committees didn't earn the money, but as practicing scientists of some renown they have earned the right to weigh in on how public dollars should be spent.
No. They have not. They haven't earned anything. If they did, they would have had a connection to a company and thru their technical expertise, chosen exactly what to develop next, with their own (or investor's) dollars at stake.
You can't claim the best at a subject and purport to demonstrate it by writing a book. Say, risk management. Real risk managers open hedge funds. Academics write about other's hedge funds.
One has battle scars. The other is soft. Soft people don't get to make decisions on how to allocate anything. No cowards for leaders, since time immemorial.
This kind of marginal risk thinking has never made sense to me because of the declining marginal value of money.
If you have $0 you can't accept any risk and can't make any decisions correctly. But if you have like $4 million you also have no reason to make any decisions correctly because risk no longer matters to you. So it relies on them having expensive tastes such that they can't just retire?
It has to do with the lindy effect. If you have $X, statistically you will quit trying to accumulate money when you have $2X. Hence you are safe to entrust some reasonable fraction of $X in without fear of you running away with it. Someone with substantially less than $X will see that as the most money they will ever see in their lifetime and immediately being trying to cash out.
> chosen exactly what to develop next, with their own (or investor's) dollars at stake.
We are talking about fundamental research here. Most investors are not interested in funding fundamental science, evidenced by the fact they have all the power to currently fund such work, but they choose not to.
> You can't claim the best at a subject and purport to demonstrate it by writing a book
They don't, they do it by doing science and building a reputation in their field for doing good work. People who work at the NSF and NIH are vouched for by others in their field.
> Real risk managers open hedge funds. Academics write about other's hedge funds.
The interests of private equity and hedge fund managers are well represented. They have plenty of say on public policy and how resources are allocated. It's good to give other people with different perspectives a say as well. Again, the total amount of money allocated for public research is very tiny compared to the rest of the federal budget, private research dollars, total hedge fund wealth, etc.