Economist: “A growing body of work shows that even as the world spends more on research, the bang for each extra buck has fallen. One explanation for this is that the way science is funded is out of date. Researchers must now contend with a daunting amount of bureaucracy. The rate at which grant applications are accepted has fallen, meaning more of them must be made. Two-fifths of a top scientist’s time is spent on things other than research, such as looking for money. One study found that researchers spent a combined 614 years applying for grants from a single funding body in Australia in 2014 alone. Risky ideas are often put aside. The current system is also monolithic. Western scientific systems are dominated by handouts of project grants and peer review. Most money flows to universities, and the academic career ladder is such that researchers face incentives to pursue incremental advances, in order to boost citations and gain tenure, rather than breakthrough work. It is time for another shake-up. A growing cadre of scientists, policymakers and philanthropists hopes to revamp science funding.”
FT: “Like many of [Kim Stanley] Robinson’s more than 20 novels, including Pacific Edge and Red Mars, The Ministry for the Future is mostly a tale of people scrambling for financial, political and scientific solutions to civilisational breakdown. And people are hungry for solutions right now. By the end of the narrative, in 2053, the fictional UN agency after which the book is named has co-ordinated an effective global response spearheaded — after much delay and denial — by developing countries including India. The concentration of CO₂ in the atmosphere falls with every passing year…“What people find encouraging in the book is that we could repeatedly f**k up and have a lot of humans fighting vigorously to wreck the world and wreck our plans, and we could still get to a good result,” Robinson tells me. This message can replace “feelings of futility or despair” with “relatively justifiable hope”, he adds. “People grab this book like it’s a life raft or a life ring out in the ocean.””
WSJ: “Proxy wars are a great bargain because they can cost so little. Hamas’s invasion of Israel on Oct. 7, says Mr. Rahe, “was a proxy war, sure. Who trained them? Who planned it? Who funds Hamas? The Iranians. What does it cost the Iranians, a little bit of money?” How many Iranian soldiers died? “Probably next to none. They’re doing it cut-price, and they gain an enormous amount because they’ve got the entire Arab world up in arms over this.” From an Iranian perspective, he says, “it’s brilliant. There was an alliance forming between Israel and the Sunni Arab states against Iran. That alliance is now in question, not because the Arab leaders have any sympathy for Hamas at all, but because of the Arab Street.” History repeats itself: “There’s nothing known to grand strategists today that Thucydides hadn’t already worked out.” The first great historian, Thucydides would have grasped right away why the U.S. backs Ukraine with political support and military equipment. But Mr. Rahe thinks he’d have wondered why the support isn’t full-bore. When your rival “gets enmeshed in a war with another power, shouldn’t you provide that other power with all the means to bleed your rival?””
WSJ: “A creator is anyone who records or makes something that can go viral on the internet, says Ursus Magana, chief executive of the creator talent management agency 25/7…Where attention flows, money—and content—must also. In 2023 brands will spend an estimated $6 billion on marketing through influencers—a subspecies of creators—according to Emarketer. Globally, the total addressable market for this kind of marketing is currently $250 billion, according to Goldman Sachs.”
Mark Koyama and Jared Rubin: “Markets are also crucial for sustained economic growth. Textbook economics often focuses on the efficiency properties of markets: the principle that in a competitive market, prices will be bid down to marginal cost so that there is no deadweight loss. But from a long-run perspective, what matters more is that markets provide incentives for innovation. Growth episodes like the Industrial Revolution were not planned by policy-makers. They resulted from an untold number of decisions by private individuals to experiment with new production methods or to build new factories or to mechanize production.” [via CafeHayek]
