Let’s start with some possible institutional failures in mainstream philanthropy. Many foundations have large staffs, and so a proposal must go through several layers of approval before it can receive support or even reach the desk of the final decision-maker. Too many vetoes are possible, which means relatively conservative, consensus-oriented proposals emerge at the end of the process. Furthermore, each layer of approval is enmeshed in an agency game, further cementing the conservatism. It is not usually career-enhancing to advance a risky or controversial proposal to one’s superiors.
This also describes the National Science Foundation. You can see how an institution like this would be biased toward funding mainstream incumbents rather than innovative, heterodox projects. It’s fine to have a lot of research money go through this model, but you also want some alternative funding mechanisms in order to have a healthy ecosystem.
Think of DARPA in its heyday. The approval process had fewer layers. Choices were more idiosyncratic.
I think where DARPA succeeded was when it had two other elements. One was a vision, in particular Licklider’s vision for computing. The other was a network of creative people. Licklider knew where to find the groups that could move his vision forward.
In his Emergent Ventures initiative, it seems to me that Cowen is not relying on his network. And I don’t see a guiding vision. It is more scattershot. That may be a valid model. But I prefer the DARPA model.
If I had the money to dole out, I would do so based on overall vision. One vision is for “rules and norms for competitive governance.” The idea would be to develop the legal framework that would allow people living side by side, in existing locations (not seasteads or charter cities), to have more choice in government services and policies. The widely-unread Unchecked and Unbalanced includes more of my thoughts about that. Of course, some of you are thinking, “Go back to the founding fathers,” but it’s not as simple as that. The founding fathers did not provide for a society in which the preponderance of people, and an even bigger preponderance of economic activity, could be found in large cities.
The other vision I have concerns economic research. I would promote an agenda that I call disaggregating the economy.
But for neither of these visions do I have anything resembling a network.
This isn’t directly related to your point – but it’s an idea that I’ve been noodling on based on your concept of competitive government:
Is there any barrier to a bunch of blue states creating a ‘confederacy’ so to speak to implement their vision of single payer? Band together and start ratcheting down federal taxes and creating a new Blue States of America conglomerate that implements all the blue priorities?
Maybe TC would fund a proposal to find you a network?
Think of DARPA in its heyday. The approval process had fewer layers. Choices were more idiosyncratic.
Isn’t the biggest problem with new ideas and improvements is there a lot of failures here? It does feel like another lifetime, but the explosion of ideas and innovation was the Dotcom was incredible but 80 – 90% of those companies failed. It was probably not their ideas on new business but how they implemented it in the marketplace and got out competed. And for whatever reason the Dotcom era long term settled on Amazon.
Also, I often think the best ideas are often small changes in which are not exciting to anybody. Compare local politicians funding big infrastructure public transportation instead of increasing bus services.
I would see most large non-profit organization are very much governed by the employees and large donors. Look at Breast Cancer in which the most effective solution is to fund Planned Parenthood facilities for Mammograms.
I am assuming this is biggest problem with solar companies right now that there is a lot good ideas and long term great potential but there will be lots of failures.
I don’t think it would be too hard or costly to establish a DisAgg network to pursue that vision.
He did give a grant to Mark Lutter / Center for Innovative Governance Research to do charter city stuff, so that’s right up the alley of competitive governance / polycentric law (see also Bell’s seminal article and Randy Barnett’s treatment in The Structure of Liberty).
Half of the grants are mostly related toome of his idiosyncratic interests. But I think it’s possible to infer not necessarily a single ‘vision’ but a kind of strategic approach that Cowen is taking to at least some of his grants. You might call it the “Scott Sumner” model of impact / influence, with Cowen helping with the early financial and prestige-prominence bootstrapping. It’s high ROI, if you are taking on overlooked areas of potentially huge significance, and from an angle that doesn’t trigger the neutralizing resistance of matters of current ideological controversy, because one will be able to rely on the automatically obsessive and monomaniacally focused work of someone else.
“How the government spends its money” may be the best “intellectual leverage multiplier opportunity” out there in terms of potential improvements to welfare. Especially if there is some possible new avenue of approach to matters that have gotten stuck circling in an intellectual cul-de-sac for a while. That’s because the government spends so much money and so poorly, that even marginal improvements may have giant benefits in the aggregate and over the long term. A “marginal revolution”, you might say.
So, for example, Eric Lofgren – who I like a lot – is supposed to be the Scott Sumner of DoD acquisition. Most people would yawn or shrug their shoulders at that topic, but of course it’s not just hundreds of billions of year affecting all those companies and workers, but touches on big fundamental problems with American Cost Disease and bureaucracy, not to mention that future national security depends on doing it right.
Jeffrey Clemens, (I guess?) is supposed to be the Scott Sumner of public health expenditures and, maybe, minimum wage rules?
The RNA-based memory research, and someone new and brilliant willing to push the whole discipline to taking it more and more seriously, is also, potentially, a huge deal (especially for Hansonian visions of the future). Neuroscience does not have a good “standard model” of how some brain functions come about if neurons and neurotransmitters are the whole game of signal processing. We know pretty much everything about those things for the simplest possible brains in nematodes, the whole connectome in 3D for only 302 neurons, but we can’t successfully emulate them. Not even close. So there is probably something very important going on at the macro-molecular level needed to solve the puzzle, and one prominent guess is that it’s some way of manipulating RNA strands.