jonwill <jonwill@erols.com> writes:
> Efficiency of funds spent on R&D could be increased through a
> global research consortium that monitors all such activity to help
> coordinate and guide all R&D efforts. Such a system could eliminate
> wasteful duplication of effort, and provide a mechanism for sharing
> of available research knowledge with and between the different R&D
> undertakings. The consortium could fund a committee of experts to
> track promising technologies and provide guidance in spending
> allocations.
Hehehehe... I hope you are aware that you have given half of the oldtimers a heart attack. Fancy hearing that view on this list :-)
Seriously, this proposal is seriously flawed by its centralism: beside the obvious problem of corruption and waste (which increases at least proportionally to the amount of money/resources a central bureaucracy handles) the consortium would also have little incentive to be good at what it is doing; if research doesn't progress as fast as it could, the consortium would just shrug and say that it needs more resources. The problem of generally predicting which areas will become useful is likely impossible to solve in practice and in principle, the centralized structure will limit the information flow to the expert comittees.
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