Of the book's prescriptions for invention, the one a collective can carry out more readily than a state is to treat the rules for allocating research money as experiments. Klein and Thompson note the US is the largest science funder yet knows little about how science works, that NIH's high-risk programme is under 0.5% of its budget, and that open-ended HHMI funding produced more flops but more hits than NIH project grants; they propose lotteries, golden tickets and report-free cohorts, independently evaluated. Our inference: an allocator that runs several funding rules side by side on its own money and publishes the comparison does what the book asks of NIH, without needing Congress.

Evidence 4 passages

• groundsAbundance, Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson

  The U.S. government is the single largest source of science funding in the world, and yet we know shockingly little about how science actually works.

• groundsAbundance, Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson

  the amount was an almost negligible fraction, less than half of 1% of the NIH's annual budget for that year.

• groundsAbundance, Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson

  Or, for some applications, we could replace the existing selection process with a random lottery.

• groundsAbundance, Ezra Klein, Derek Thompson

  They found that HHMI funding led to more flops, but also more hits, more original discoveries, and more high-impact articles.

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