Part of the problem is that a lot of basic funding mechanisms have sort of broken down, or we've lost sight of certain things, or aren't open enough or supporti

Part of the problem is that a lot of basic funding mechanisms have sort of broken down, or we've lost sight of certain things, or aren't open enough or supportive enough as a society of diverse research funding mechanisms. Just to take one example: at one time, you had a university, someone applied for a tenure-track job. The idea was, if they passed the tenure hoops, had the approval of their peers, etc. the university was essentially "funding the person". That was the idea: the public (or private benefactors) trust a university to appoint faculty who will identify people who are successful with worthwhile research. That is the idea behind tenure at a university, at some level. You as the public entrust the state to fund research, with the idea that there is some benefit and risk attached to that benefit. Now, though, this idea has broken down, in that the current paradigm is for the university to find people who will get funding from the federal government, to fund their projects. The university is no longer "funding the person" at some level, it's passing that buck on to the federal government, and letting the federal government decide. So while, at one time, we had a very decentralized "fund the person" model (in the form of individual states and universities deciding who to fund), that's started to fail, in favor of a very centralized funding model where we basically rely on the federal government for funding everything. There's just not enough options for people wanting to do research; it's too homogenous and too narrow in terms of incentive structures. It's like anything else: if you set up a system where there's one way to do it, you're going to incentivize taking advantage of that system.