You're absolutely right in saying that we need to increase our budget, and that the citizenry could afford to crowd fund science sustainably if they chose to do so.
Outside of the obvious issues with implementing crowd funded science in an academic setting (Who owns the IP? How does overhead work? How do you verify that the work is being done if there are no deliverables and a high failure rate? How much money can go to salary? etc). The two obvious problems I see with crowd funding science are lack of ROI and ignorant investors.
> People spend more than that on iPhones.
> Kickstarter is already crossing this threshold. It has already raised several billion and its only 5 years old and that number is growing exponentially.
People get ROI at Kickstarter in the form of products. People get ROI in the form of utility from buying Apple products. There is no obvious route to ROI from crowdfunding science. Perhaps a system can be devised where investors are invited to take part in some of the work or can track the progress and get regular briefs, but this would be enormously distracting to the investigators. Maybe I'm just cold hearted, but I simply don't see people giving away billions of dollars per year to fund science (I would love to be proven wrong though!)
The second potential issue with crowd funding science is the difficulty in evaluating the merit of proposed projects. The general public (and most of the scientific community) is not qualified to evaluate the legitimacy or impact of highly domain specific projects. How do people decide what is a good project vs a bad project within a discipline? How do people evaluate projects across disciplines? Sexy translational projects involving novel therapeurics / device development may be easily pitched, but who is going to invest in boring basic science in a zebra fish model? What happens when groups come in to take advantage of this ignorance and pitch bullshit projects and then walk away with the money? This situation also dissuades people from funding young investigators. If people don't understand the projects, they're likely to fund people with established track records and titles because that seems safer, not new people.
As I have espoused in previous threads involving the academic science model, one way to solve our current funding problem and the problem of title requirements may be to augment the academic science model with for profit (or not for profit) institutes. I would envision such institutes immediately granting PhD or post-doc level investigators PI status so that they could apply for all grants, and allowing BS level scientists to do research without having to go through PhD programs. Such institutes might also uncap investigator salaries so that investigators could be paid fairly, and would allow investigators to own their IP. These places could also charge significantly less overhead than universities as they don't need to fund non-science related endeavors. Perhaps crowd funding could be used to establish or augment such institutes, which could then bring in established investigators to oversee how money raised is distributed.
Another solution to the funding and title problems is simply to increase government funding, but tie in rules which stipulate that universities much raise the number of faculty spots or add restricted faculty spots for very junior investigators.
These seem like plausible solutions, but the idea of a crowd funded marketplace for science seems frankly dubious.
> Outside of the obvious issues with implementing crowd funded science in an academic setting (Who owns the IP? How does overhead work? How do you verify that the work is being done if there are no deliverables and a high failure rate? How much money can go to salary? etc). The two obvious problems I see with crowd funding science are lack of ROI and ignorant investors.
I guess we will just have to agree to disagree. I'm of the mindset that the market solves everything and will answer all the questions you pose. Academia/govt. is horribly inefficient and the money is running out there for several the reasons such as no deliverables. It academia/govt was forced to bail space exploration (SpaceX), it seems much easier to understand how this will happen in other sectors.
> I'm of the mindset that the market solves everything and will answer all the questions you pose. Academia/govt. is horribly inefficient and the money is running out there for several the reasons such as no deliverables.
The government funds basic science specifically because the market WON'T do it. A classic example is the work done on early cancer research. This breakthrough work along with several blockbuster drugs came entirely out of government sponsored research and work in academia. Pharmaceutical companies weren't interested in performing the basic research because they didn't forsee a good ROI. It was only after basic research was done and the market developed that pharmaceutical companies became interested in what is now one of the most lucrative drug categories.
Outside of the obvious issues with implementing crowd funded science in an academic setting (Who owns the IP? How does overhead work? How do you verify that the work is being done if there are no deliverables and a high failure rate? How much money can go to salary? etc). The two obvious problems I see with crowd funding science are lack of ROI and ignorant investors.
> People spend more than that on iPhones.
> Kickstarter is already crossing this threshold. It has already raised several billion and its only 5 years old and that number is growing exponentially.
People get ROI at Kickstarter in the form of products. People get ROI in the form of utility from buying Apple products. There is no obvious route to ROI from crowdfunding science. Perhaps a system can be devised where investors are invited to take part in some of the work or can track the progress and get regular briefs, but this would be enormously distracting to the investigators. Maybe I'm just cold hearted, but I simply don't see people giving away billions of dollars per year to fund science (I would love to be proven wrong though!)
The second potential issue with crowd funding science is the difficulty in evaluating the merit of proposed projects. The general public (and most of the scientific community) is not qualified to evaluate the legitimacy or impact of highly domain specific projects. How do people decide what is a good project vs a bad project within a discipline? How do people evaluate projects across disciplines? Sexy translational projects involving novel therapeurics / device development may be easily pitched, but who is going to invest in boring basic science in a zebra fish model? What happens when groups come in to take advantage of this ignorance and pitch bullshit projects and then walk away with the money? This situation also dissuades people from funding young investigators. If people don't understand the projects, they're likely to fund people with established track records and titles because that seems safer, not new people.
As I have espoused in previous threads involving the academic science model, one way to solve our current funding problem and the problem of title requirements may be to augment the academic science model with for profit (or not for profit) institutes. I would envision such institutes immediately granting PhD or post-doc level investigators PI status so that they could apply for all grants, and allowing BS level scientists to do research without having to go through PhD programs. Such institutes might also uncap investigator salaries so that investigators could be paid fairly, and would allow investigators to own their IP. These places could also charge significantly less overhead than universities as they don't need to fund non-science related endeavors. Perhaps crowd funding could be used to establish or augment such institutes, which could then bring in established investigators to oversee how money raised is distributed.
Another solution to the funding and title problems is simply to increase government funding, but tie in rules which stipulate that universities much raise the number of faculty spots or add restricted faculty spots for very junior investigators.
These seem like plausible solutions, but the idea of a crowd funded marketplace for science seems frankly dubious.