Central Planning of Cancer Research

You also see this in the humanities funding. In order to get funding, you have to prove that you can be completely successful without it.

I think we have our funding priorities completely backwards, anyway. We fund people to look for something, and the people we fund will, of course, look and look and look. Need more funding to keep looking. But if you paid people for finding something, you might be surprised at how much is suddenly found. Of course, you really need both.

I have a friend who used to work for a PBS station, and he said that the producers, et al were all very conservative in their choices of what to put on. They were afraid of any sort of real controversy -- and they wanted to make sure they kept both the donors and the government officials happy.

All in all, you can't expect the government to support anything that is truly risky.

I always find it interesting when The New York Times prints a story like this. I imagine their response would be that either the right people aren't in place or something small needs to be tweaked. They would never suggest that the entire idea of government-funded research is flawed. That would be crazy talk.

Hey, it's not bad weather for rainy season here on GCM!

From my classes on industrial organization I remember that the prize model fits well if investment needed for the breakthrough is limited in time and effort and chances are predicatable. If the outcome is highly unpredictable in time and effort, it is hard to set the right price for innovation (there is Hayek again).

It looks like Tullocks' system wouldn't have gotten Eileen K. Jaffe any money up front as well. She is used to getting money up front, so probably wouldn't have followed this line of inquiry if the incentives would have been more Tullockian.

Does the Federal government have a monopoly on cancer funding?

I say the same thing to people who whine about pharma companies only producing drugs that are profitable to them. They're not stopping other groups from producing other drugs.

Surely there are other groups with assets willing to fund cancer research, even to set up prizes.

"Does the Federal government have a monopoly on cancer funding?"

Not in this country (yet). But they do get to tax everyone, and then subsidize research, giving them a significant market advantage.

So now you know a little bit. Even if you don't know everything, you've done something worthwhile: you've expanded your knowledge. - William B. Doyle, http://www.wbdoyle.com/blog/