[IG_Semmelweiss]

I think you are on point. I also wonder what the system would look like if you suddenly took out govt money out of the university system.

I suspect there would be a lot less research, but perhaps whatever papers made it to the finish line, they would be much more meaningful ?

[Calamity]

I think you would just get a lot less research overall. It might lead to a better fraction of research being of higher quality, but in absolute terms, it would be a drastic cut.

R&D is always going to be a sunk cost, especially when exploring "new frontiers". Funding people to "waste their time" going down different uncharted paths - with most of them leading to dead-ends - is still the only way to have a few return with new insight from those paths that led to new and wondrous areas.

You can already see this at the scale of "what" government chooses to fund. For years they have funded cancer research which has made many advances, but they did not fund "ageing" research anywhere close to as much. Recent advances in the latter have shown this to be a promising field, but imagine the advances we could have had had this been funded to the same extent that cancer research has!