[Y_Y]

This is a fantastic idea. Graduate students have to compete for so little funding (or even just unfunded slots) that the wage and conditions are at a bare minimum. Just a shot at those sweet professor jobs (whether or not they exist) or just adding to the world's knowledge send to be so desirable that people will work ridiculous hours with no benefits for pitiful pay. But why should the grads compete with each other?

What's next should be academia uniting to distribute funding internally, rather than stock with the farcical lotteries that are grant proposals.

[aaron-lebo]

Not every project is deserving of funding. Grants provide at least one filter, and at least in my experience have some correlation to merit. There's just not enough money, spreading it out doesn't help.

Attaching funding to academic politics sounds like the death of innovation, but that may be an exaggeration.

[Y_Y]

Knowing what projects "deserve" funding before they're funded is a harder problem than any funding body would like to admit. I'm not proposing all available money is divided up equally, in saying that the application should be done in an efficient way by a union of academics.