I enjoyed this. Compared to government R&D investments in other countries, we seem to get much better returns in the U.S. After 15 years working in philanthropy, I’ve seen how impact gets diluted when funding ramps up. We see it in frothy investment markets too. Curious for your take on how to maintain high ROI if you triple government spending on R&D. With 3x more investment, should we expect 2x more return? Less?
On return estimates, this is something I want to dig into deeper in the future. I've seen higher estimates in the U.S. as well, and in any case the ranges are decently large. The Science|Business report linked above was actually related to an EU investigation and about half of the data points they cite are from EU studies, so at first order I take the 20% to be an EU/US mixed number.
I also plan to dig into the diminishing returns question in the future as well. At the margin of today, I think there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. For example, the government gets more grant applications that seemingly pass merit thresholds than it funds. If this were just opened up a bit wider the returns probably wouldn't diminish much, if at all. There could also be targeted requests for grants in certain expected productivity-enhancing research areas. Another low-hanging fruit idea is to subsidize more academic positions--it's just too hard to stay in acedemia right now and so a lot of great people don't. But low-hanging fruit only gets you so far (2x?) before you start needing new programs. At the end, I linked to https://www.rebuilding.tech/, which has a host of such policy ideas.
I just asked o3 for a summary of research about quality of NIH proposals for top-tier, second-tier, and rejected. Pretty interesting findings. I can imagine a version of rebuilding.tech with rejected NIH/NSF applications that should have been funded.
I enjoyed this. Compared to government R&D investments in other countries, we seem to get much better returns in the U.S. After 15 years working in philanthropy, I’ve seen how impact gets diluted when funding ramps up. We see it in frothy investment markets too. Curious for your take on how to maintain high ROI if you triple government spending on R&D. With 3x more investment, should we expect 2x more return? Less?
Thanks!
On return estimates, this is something I want to dig into deeper in the future. I've seen higher estimates in the U.S. as well, and in any case the ranges are decently large. The Science|Business report linked above was actually related to an EU investigation and about half of the data points they cite are from EU studies, so at first order I take the 20% to be an EU/US mixed number.
I also plan to dig into the diminishing returns question in the future as well. At the margin of today, I think there is a lot of low-hanging fruit. For example, the government gets more grant applications that seemingly pass merit thresholds than it funds. If this were just opened up a bit wider the returns probably wouldn't diminish much, if at all. There could also be targeted requests for grants in certain expected productivity-enhancing research areas. Another low-hanging fruit idea is to subsidize more academic positions--it's just too hard to stay in acedemia right now and so a lot of great people don't. But low-hanging fruit only gets you so far (2x?) before you start needing new programs. At the end, I linked to https://www.rebuilding.tech/, which has a host of such policy ideas.
I just asked o3 for a summary of research about quality of NIH proposals for top-tier, second-tier, and rejected. Pretty interesting findings. I can imagine a version of rebuilding.tech with rejected NIH/NSF applications that should have been funded.