[coldtea]

>So do you have an actual proposal for how we should be rewarding these people?

Sure.

An innovation tax, and a group of cross industry and academic people (e.g. a mix of successful founders, engineers, great researchers, Nobel winners, plus a jury of common folk etc) that decides, every e.g. 5-10 years, who gets to share the money among a shortlist of potential benefactors.

"Hmm, looks like this Turing person did good work in retrospect that hugely helped our society. Let him have $100 million of the $1 billion innovation fund".

[WJW]

That seems like an amazingly gameable system. In particular, it would reward the ones who are best at taking credit, which are not necessarily the same ones that did the actual innovating. Further, it requires the deciding group to be reasonably free of prejudice. As little as a few decades back it would have completely ignored any contributions by women, for example. Finally, I would not be surprised if an outsized amount of the 'prize money' went to friends/family/acquintances of the people in the decider group.

[lajhsdfkl]

And this innovation tax takes priority over all of the other things that need to be funded? What about the millions without healthcare? Also are we really going to trust some bureaucratic institution to dispense billions of dollars in a fair manner?

[coldtea]

>And this innovation tax takes priority over all of the other things that need to be funded?

Who said that? For one, we can tax people more. For another, we could do a better job on spending the tax money (e.g. stop trillions going to tax cuts or military spending or BS projects).

>Also are we really going to trust some bureaucratic institution to dispense billions of dollars in a fair manner?

I mentioned a panel of non-government successful people, on academy and the market, who votes, not an "institution", much less a "bureaucratic" one.