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How Economic Theory and the Netflix Prize Could Make Research Funding More Efficient:
In a paper published Jan. 2 in the journal PLOS Biology, co-authors Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington, and Kevin Gross, a professor of statistics at North Carolina State University, use the economic theory of contests to illustrate how this competitive system has made the pursuit of research funding inefficient and unsustainable. They show that alternative methods, such as a partial lottery to award grants, could help get professors back in the lab where they belong.
[...] "When agencies only fund the top 10 or 20 percent, they aren't just separating bad ideas from good ideas," said Bergstrom. "They're also separating good from good."
"This has two effects on the grant-application process," said Gross. "First, professors must apply for more and more grants before they're awarded one. Second, the application process becomes a contest to determine who can write the best grant proposals -- so professors spend more and more time trying to perfect each individual application."
[...] Using the economic theory of contests, Gross and Bergstrom modeled a controversial alternative: awarding grants instead by partial lottery. Under a partial lottery system, funds are awarded by random draw among a pool of high-ranking grants -- the top 40 percent, for example. Since applicants would be aiming to clear a lower bar for a smaller prize -- a shot at the lottery instead of a guaranteed payout for winning proposals -- the contest theory model predicts that applicants would spend less time trying to perfect their applications, Bergstrom said.
[...] But partial lotteries aren't the only viable solution, they say. Funding agencies could also award grants based on merit, such as a professor's past record of excellence in research. But that system also would need mechanisms to help early-career faculty and professors from underrepresented groups obtain grants, Bergstrom said. Hybrid systems are another option, such as a partial lottery for early-career faculty and merit-based grants for later-career faculty.
Journal Reference:
Kevin Gross, Carl T. Bergstrom. Contest models highlight inherent inefficiencies of scientific funding competitions. PLOS Biology, 2019; 17 (1): e3000065 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pbio.3000065
(Score: 2) by bzipitidoo on Friday January 04 2019, @03:31PM (2 children)
> plunge a considerable portion of humanity into counterproductive poverty
That is not true. It's the opposite. Doing all kinds of good things that will help with Global Warming should that be a real problem, and will be good to do anyway if Global Warming is not real or not a bad problem, is a lot of work. That's a lot of jobs. That's the Green New Deal. In contrast, making no changes means no new jobs. Means sitting on our asses while the world melts.
> obvious rebuttal to the whole rant is that Big Oil propaganda is nearly non-existent.
That's mighty blind of you. Whole lot of industries engage in self-serving propaganda and the devil with society, the environment, our health, and everything except the moolah. Big Tobacco launched the modern corporate propaganda style with their "doubt is our product" denial of the addictiveness and unhealthiness of cigarettes. Big Media has been ranting against piracy and "digital theft" for decades. Wall Street pulled that whole "Too Big to Fail" scam on the whole world. In the US, Big Pharma and doctors are keeping health care unjustifiably expensive, shamelessly playing on our respect for medical doctors. Telecoms preach against "unfair" competition from small governments. And so on. I don't know, maybe you don't think any of that is unethical or immoral, is lying, and is damaging to us all. But if you do, how can you not see that Big Oil is no exception to this pattern of reckless, careless, and greedy behavior that so much of big business does? And BTW, that pattern of bad behavior may indeed ultimately be a worse problem than Global Warming.
Nuclear weapons are still a big problem. So far, humanity has kept our natural competitiveness from that level of destructiveness, and I am hopeful that for the near future at least, no one will dare seriously consider their use, whatever blustering and threatening they may do. But we may have gotten a little too complacent about that danger. Nations have shown good restraint, so far, though there were a few close calls, such as the Cuban Missile Crisis. I particularly applaud the Soviet Union and the Russian people for managing their decline and fall without having a fit of mad desperation or insanity or whatever, and deciding to launch the nukes. But there are plenty of madmen in the world who would detonate the nukes if they could.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Friday January 04 2019, @11:33PM
If that was really the Green New Deal, I would be tempted to grit my teeth and go along with the faulty 'science' in order to get the benefits. But it is not.
The Green New Deal is more poverty, more inequality and a further reduction in the standard of living of the 99%. If climate change was a real problem, the people who promote it would make real changes to their behavior, and advocate for things that would actually mitigate it. They don't. They loudly proclaim that all the peasants must tighten their belts and suffer, while they fly their private jets to conferences in ski resorts and private beaches.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 1) by khallow on Saturday January 05 2019, @05:51AM
We can just look at actual climate change mitigation with such things as climate change treaties that do nothing except generate economic hardship (Kyoto, Paris), doubling of electricity prices in countries that bought in enormously to renewables (Germany, Denmark) without a significant reduction of CO2, self-serving corn lobby efforts in the US (ethanol subsidies and mandates) that drove up the cost of food globally, and so on. The only people who do well are the ones profiting from the action directly or who don't participate at all.
Aside from the billions of jobs created through the ongoing economic expansive that has gone on for the past few centuries, but shifted to a much higher gear in the last 50 years. It's worth noting that something like two billion workers have been added to the global economy in the past few decades even while we've done nothing useful about climate change.
You know what's missing from this "Big Oil could be doing something wrong" speech? Actual evidence of the Big Oil propaganda machine. I think we have evidence instead that this stuff is good for the business. Sure, oil prices are kind of low now, but Big Oil had record profits a few years back at the height of the climate change hysteria.
This is the typical rationalization speech that I've come to expect from climate change boosters. They want climate change mitigation so they rationalize, completely without justification, that the mitigation will be beneficial. The "job creation" is a classic ass pull. There's no evidence that jobs are being created by climate change mitigation because you're completely ignoring the costs of the mitigation which destroy jobs. Meanwhile we have half a century of evidence that one can do absolutely nothing about climate change and still create enormous numbers of jobs.
My view on this is that the most important thing here is the economic side. Any mitigation that creates massive poverty is going to ultimately fail hard because poverty creates high fertility poor people who create overpopulation which makes the climate change problem worse. Meanwhile the usual wealth building that has been going on for centuries generates low fertility people and a declining population - the only long term sustainability of climate change you'll get other than population crashes every so often.
Wealthy countries don't tend to get madmen in charge. And how does the disruptions of climate change mitigation help? You're creating an environment where the crazy rule. Bottom line is that we've had a few decades to show the need for near future climate change mitigation and its impact. It's been a dismal failure on both parts. Anyone still in charge advocating such practices has screws loose.