[burntoutfire]

Unfortunately, availability of money for an speculative work results in emergence of entire industry of scammers, whose only competence is getting grants to do that speculative work. For example, various European Union programmes are overtaken by such people.

Also, this is the reason why VCs, after funding a startup, generallly prefer to be breathing down the CEO's neck (instead of a hands-off approach) - they know that the temptation do just burn through someone else's money while doing a half-assed attempt is too strong for many. In other words, people in general are took weak morally for your idea to produce good results.

[ok_dad]

My wife says a similar thing, and I agree that it's a hard problem to solve to prevent all that cash going to someone who will just play video games for the length of the grant. I guess you still need some signal that a person will work somewhat diligently on the grant work. I still think that it's important to fund that sort of work because there are so many examples of famous mathematicians in history who were just bored rich folks, or folks who had a benefactor and an idea, or maybe just a poor hermit from nowhere.

[burntoutfire]

Well, we were getting pretty nice results pre-XX century, before any of the taxpayers' money got (forcibly) involved. Why not just continue relying on that proven model (i.e. the rich bored folks, the benefactors and the crazy hermits)? Esp. in math, where there's no need for any equipment or materials, it seemed to work well.

[ok_dad]

I can see that, but I don't want to get into the implications for taxes and such, that's a polarizing topic. Wherever it comes from, it's necessary to support people with good ideas (and even some bad ones).