Continuing from my previous post regarding the Draghi report (linked above), I believe it is essential to critically examine the report’s overly enthusiastic praise of the European Research Grants program. While the program is undoubtedly impactful, I would argue that its current structure, which heavily concentrates resources on a limited number of recipients, has some notable shortcomings. This perspective is supported by an insightful study published in the Elsevier journal Research Policy, which highlights significant challenges associated with highly stratified programs (see the extracted section below). Why not reduce the value of individual ERC grants by half, allowing the program to support twice as many grantees?
"stratification creates higher levels of inequality which eventually induce disadvantaged participants to exit the market. Relatively high exit rates are common in highly competitive fields. Science, for example, has been described as a “a primitive village with maximum fecundity and horrible mortality” (Desolla Price, 1965). Back in the 1960s, the scientific population grew by 7% each year, with a 17% “birth rate” and a 10% “death rate.” However, now up to 84% of new PhD recipients in biology are expected to exit academia due to the lack of tenure track positions (Larson et al., 2014). Furthermore, “quitting” among those who succeed to stay in academia can come in the form of reduced willingness to compete for funding opportunities (Bol et al., 2018), fueling rich-get-richer dynamics. Given this high exit rate, we should take opportunities to explore new mechanisms to reduce—but by no means eliminate—competitive pressure: the objective is rebalancing the current high levels of reward stratification towards a more sustainable equilibrium" https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0048733321000160?via%3Dihub#sec0022
PS - The aforementioned paper is co-authored by Christoph Riedl, who is affiliated with both Northeastern University and Harvard University. I previously mentioned Riedl in a post discussing creativity in research https://19-pacheco-torgal-19.blogspot.com/2024/09/aarhus-university-creativity-in-research.html
