In my experience, this doesn't work. In my country the R&D budget is quite small in the first place, and there were huge cuts during the 2008 crisis. The resu

In my experience, this doesn't work. In my country the R&D budget is quite small in the first place, and there were huge cuts during the 2008 crisis. The result of the cuts was mainly that the mafias, old researchers with political influence, and people who are experts in gaming the system got to keep their funding. In general, newcomers, young researchers, and genuinely good researchers who aren't that good at gaming the system suffered the most. No, the truth is that these problems are caused precisely by the insane levels of competitiveness for funding - and solutions must reduce that level of competitiveness for funding, not increase it.