Interesting. One thing that stands out is how these kind of patronage funds today all focus on business and problem solving. I would like to see more focus on art and basic research. Perhaps they exist and I'm unawares.
I didn't find many. There are a few grants, but none of them are all that substantial, and there aren't very many of them in any case ... And I fully agree!.
Forget the MacArthurs. Despite Rod MacArthur's intentions when he set up the foundation, to give to people missed by the other foundations, to people who really need the money, etc., the foundation gives money to the same people everyone else funds. Yes, the money comes without strings, which is nice, but for the last ten years (which I've been tracking) the majority of the grants go to people who have secure gigs, mostly at universities. They don't need the grant money either to survive or to do good work.
The Mac Fellows program gets the foundation a LOT of press annually, more than any other program by the foundation, or any other foundation for that matter. But it's a relatively small percentage of their annual outlay. Think of it as overhead expense for PR. The "Genius Grant" moniker is worth a lot, and the foundation didn't even come up with it. So they can be coy about it.
I feel this is a scaling problem. If you can only give to 20 people everyone chases the same 20. Same as VCs in some ways - everyone goes for the hyped investments. Once you scale the offering to 200 or a 1000, this should hopefully get back to its original intentions !
And really indexing article too btw, thanks for sharing!
Maybe. But the MacArthur Foundation really does seem to be captured by the same conservative spirit that prevails in the foundation world. They almost have to be in order to maintain their standing.
Contrast them with Theil and Cowen. Those guys each has a vision of the world, a sense of things they want to see done. They make their funding decisions out of that vision. The MacArthur Foundation doesn't have anything like that. The mandate for the Fellows Program is simply to pick creative people. And it's done through an elaborate not-at-all-transparent process. But in the end it's a committee. And the committee just has that rather vague but noble-sounding mandate. Which is useless as a guide to selection.
If the MacArthur Foundation could pick 200 fellows a year, 110 of them would be at prestigious institutions. They simply don't know how to do anything else. When I started writing that material I had one simple idea, don't fund anyone who has a secure gig. That way at least the money is going to people who need it.
A final note. I got my degree in the English Department at SUNY Buffalo back in the 70s. It was a very experimental program - they allowed me to study computational linguistics, for example. That department thought of Harvard English as a bastion of high-class deadwood. There's a lot of that in the world, and some of them have Big Macs. I'm not saying that the Ivy League recipients of Macs aren't smart and creative, some of them no doubt are. The fact that they are at Ivys (or similar institutions) and even highly regarded is no guarantee. But they don't need the money. Take a risk and give it to someone who has to wait tables or do piecework for Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Yeah the conservative streak is definitely a problem, and one which iconoclasts like Thiel have a chance to change. The streak is what I meant is somewhat inevitable when you're in the public eye and with limited ability to the risk... In fact Thiel genius of choosing late teenagers is fantastic because it's much harder to find credentialed 19yos.
In theory it’s hard to find credentialed 19 year olds. In practice, the Thiel Fellows have all been very accomplished by the time they were chosen as Fellows (winning national science contests, publishing magazines, working in scientific labs, starting businesses, etc)
& you have Cowen's idea of a bunch of people like him giving out Emergent Venture type grants. Get a whole bunch of different people to do it for a year. Provide them with funds to disperse and have a quick and dirty application process like he set up for Emergent Ventures.
That site also requires a sign-up, which is very annoying. The second advantage of OSF/arxiv sites is that they provide you with a free DOI, and indexing in the academic search engines.
Patronage is a fascinating historical subject, and this'd all be so much easier to discuss properly on the merits if Thiel wasn't a fascist/adjacent. But alas. :-(
I just can't support men like him because I just can't support fascism and other anti-humanistic creeds in tech. (Or anywhere; but especially not in tech, and especially especially not in dear God help us AI.) And if there are ten people on Earth I'd rather starve than be financially beholden to, Thiel's got to have a place of 'respect' on that list. So he could say the freaking sun was rising and I'd rush outside to behold it plunging into his swimming pool. :-/
I'm pretty sure it's worth noting that Vitalik got his Thiel fellowship *after* he helped found Ethereum. (it is true that his net worth and influence have exploded since the fellowship, though)
Post pandemic recovery is now a global game-changer... and rise of 500 million new entrepreneurs on march mostly from Asia and some 500 million existing SME across the world... Entrepreneurialism & Digitalization: Recovery of Midsize Business Economies
OMG I’ve been making some of the same arguments to my friends for a year! Here’s a short post making a similar point about Thiel Fellowship scaling (but didn’t touch on patronage).
Nowadays it's much harder to make a contribution to the society as an individual compared to the Medici's days. Funding Kepler or de Brahe could give you huge advances in astronomy, because there was a lot low hanging fruits there that could be discovered with a relatively simple apparatus, such as telescope. Nowadays, you would have to spend tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of mandays to build something like gravitational wave detectors and still, the contribution you get from that are smaller. At least in science, the genius scientist archetype is dead and institutions are the only way to go forward.
The increasing complexity of traditional sciences is definitely a problem, and I'm worried about the same phenomenon. However, I'm more optimistic that these aren't the only places we could make progress, and indeed new fields should arise where individuals can have disproportionate imapct.
Any ideas on which fields or intersections individuals can contribute with little capital to start with?
Aside: The internet might have changed the nature of science in a dramatic way by making facts and concepts instantly accessible and giving the illusion of actually understanding them. When so many ideas are competing for attention, might be harder to sustain ideas and do deep work. Just a hypothesis though, need to check what's actually happening.
I have a similar worry on the second point, which is that the sheer quantity of information makes discovery harder. On the first, it's unclear - the wins in Thiel have all been in single-field domains whether that's crypto or tech startups. It will hit the broader base as the ways in which it interacts with aspects of science (bio/ space) starts to become more achievable.
Re-think education models: Economic prosperity is largely the "national mobilization of entrepreneurialism". Entrepreneurialism is neither academia-born nor academic-centric. The grassroots prosperity is only a byproduct of entrepreneurial philosophy based real value creation productivity models and not confused with solely money-making-schemes economic models of value-manipulation. Universities and colleges best for academics are simply not qualified to transform entrepreneurialism on a large scale. Observe why it is always the entrepreneurial leadership that builds an enterprise, therefore, not having entrepreneurial representation at major economic decisions is a serious mistake.
The reputational risk and social downside of patronage is a non-starter and borders on the strawman fallacy. The solution is obvious, give anonymously.
Interesting. One thing that stands out is how these kind of patronage funds today all focus on business and problem solving. I would like to see more focus on art and basic research. Perhaps they exist and I'm unawares.
I didn't find many. There are a few grants, but none of them are all that substantial, and there aren't very many of them in any case ... And I fully agree!.
Forget the MacArthurs. Despite Rod MacArthur's intentions when he set up the foundation, to give to people missed by the other foundations, to people who really need the money, etc., the foundation gives money to the same people everyone else funds. Yes, the money comes without strings, which is nice, but for the last ten years (which I've been tracking) the majority of the grants go to people who have secure gigs, mostly at universities. They don't need the grant money either to survive or to do good work.
The Mac Fellows program gets the foundation a LOT of press annually, more than any other program by the foundation, or any other foundation for that matter. But it's a relatively small percentage of their annual outlay. Think of it as overhead expense for PR. The "Genius Grant" moniker is worth a lot, and the foundation didn't even come up with it. So they can be coy about it.
I did a bit of research on the "Big Macs" (my term) a decade ago and wrote it up as <a href="https://www.academia.edu/7974651/The_Genius_Chronicles_Going_Boldly_Where_None_Have_Gone_Before">The Genius Chronicles: Going Boldly Where None Have Gone Before?</a> That includes annual updates through 2018, when I stopped doing updates because they were so predictable.
I feel this is a scaling problem. If you can only give to 20 people everyone chases the same 20. Same as VCs in some ways - everyone goes for the hyped investments. Once you scale the offering to 200 or a 1000, this should hopefully get back to its original intentions !
And really indexing article too btw, thanks for sharing!
Maybe. But the MacArthur Foundation really does seem to be captured by the same conservative spirit that prevails in the foundation world. They almost have to be in order to maintain their standing.
Contrast them with Theil and Cowen. Those guys each has a vision of the world, a sense of things they want to see done. They make their funding decisions out of that vision. The MacArthur Foundation doesn't have anything like that. The mandate for the Fellows Program is simply to pick creative people. And it's done through an elaborate not-at-all-transparent process. But in the end it's a committee. And the committee just has that rather vague but noble-sounding mandate. Which is useless as a guide to selection.
If the MacArthur Foundation could pick 200 fellows a year, 110 of them would be at prestigious institutions. They simply don't know how to do anything else. When I started writing that material I had one simple idea, don't fund anyone who has a secure gig. That way at least the money is going to people who need it.
A final note. I got my degree in the English Department at SUNY Buffalo back in the 70s. It was a very experimental program - they allowed me to study computational linguistics, for example. That department thought of Harvard English as a bastion of high-class deadwood. There's a lot of that in the world, and some of them have Big Macs. I'm not saying that the Ivy League recipients of Macs aren't smart and creative, some of them no doubt are. The fact that they are at Ivys (or similar institutions) and even highly regarded is no guarantee. But they don't need the money. Take a risk and give it to someone who has to wait tables or do piecework for Amazon Mechanical Turk.
Yeah the conservative streak is definitely a problem, and one which iconoclasts like Thiel have a chance to change. The streak is what I meant is somewhat inevitable when you're in the public eye and with limited ability to the risk... In fact Thiel genius of choosing late teenagers is fantastic because it's much harder to find credentialed 19yos.
In theory it’s hard to find credentialed 19 year olds. In practice, the Thiel Fellows have all been very accomplished by the time they were chosen as Fellows (winning national science contests, publishing magazines, working in scientific labs, starting businesses, etc)
& you have Cowen's idea of a bunch of people like him giving out Emergent Venture type grants. Get a whole bunch of different people to do it for a year. Provide them with funds to disperse and have a quick and dirty application process like he set up for Emergent Ventures.
Interesting. Could you post this somewhere else than academia.edu? Horrible website. I suggest https://osf.io/preprints/
I'm already posting to 3 or 4 sites. I have no intention of adding another to the list. If you don't like academia, try this: https://www.scribd.com/document/182675705/The-Genius-Chronicles-Going-Boldly-Where-None-Have-Gone-Before
That site also requires a sign-up, which is very annoying. The second advantage of OSF/arxiv sites is that they provide you with a free DOI, and indexing in the academic search engines.
Anyway, here's a mirror for those who also dislike forced sign-up websites: https://emilkirkegaard.dk/en/wp-content/uploads/ilide.info-the-genius-chronicles-going-boldly-where-none-have-gone-before-pr_4f5a5d747da4505903c3dffc1548531d.pdf
Patronage is a fascinating historical subject, and this'd all be so much easier to discuss properly on the merits if Thiel wasn't a fascist/adjacent. But alas. :-(
I just can't support men like him because I just can't support fascism and other anti-humanistic creeds in tech. (Or anywhere; but especially not in tech, and especially especially not in dear God help us AI.) And if there are ten people on Earth I'd rather starve than be financially beholden to, Thiel's got to have a place of 'respect' on that list. So he could say the freaking sun was rising and I'd rush outside to behold it plunging into his swimming pool. :-/
I'm pretty sure it's worth noting that Vitalik got his Thiel fellowship *after* he helped found Ethereum. (it is true that his net worth and influence have exploded since the fellowship, though)
Post pandemic recovery is now a global game-changer... and rise of 500 million new entrepreneurs on march mostly from Asia and some 500 million existing SME across the world... Entrepreneurialism & Digitalization: Recovery of Midsize Business Economies
https://moderndiplomacy.eu/2021/07/22/entrepreneurialism-digitalization-recovery-of-midsize-business-economies/
Medici had better taste in art and political candidates than Thiel
OMG I’ve been making some of the same arguments to my friends for a year! Here’s a short post making a similar point about Thiel Fellowship scaling (but didn’t touch on patronage).
https://h-friedman.medium.com/how-the-thiel-fellowship-succeeded-and-failed-ea82b15bd345
Lovely read thanks for sharing!
Nowadays it's much harder to make a contribution to the society as an individual compared to the Medici's days. Funding Kepler or de Brahe could give you huge advances in astronomy, because there was a lot low hanging fruits there that could be discovered with a relatively simple apparatus, such as telescope. Nowadays, you would have to spend tens of millions of dollars and hundreds of thousands of mandays to build something like gravitational wave detectors and still, the contribution you get from that are smaller. At least in science, the genius scientist archetype is dead and institutions are the only way to go forward.
The increasing complexity of traditional sciences is definitely a problem, and I'm worried about the same phenomenon. However, I'm more optimistic that these aren't the only places we could make progress, and indeed new fields should arise where individuals can have disproportionate imapct.
Any ideas on which fields or intersections individuals can contribute with little capital to start with?
Aside: The internet might have changed the nature of science in a dramatic way by making facts and concepts instantly accessible and giving the illusion of actually understanding them. When so many ideas are competing for attention, might be harder to sustain ideas and do deep work. Just a hypothesis though, need to check what's actually happening.
I have a similar worry on the second point, which is that the sheer quantity of information makes discovery harder. On the first, it's unclear - the wins in Thiel have all been in single-field domains whether that's crypto or tech startups. It will hit the broader base as the ways in which it interacts with aspects of science (bio/ space) starts to become more achievable.
Re-think education models: Economic prosperity is largely the "national mobilization of entrepreneurialism". Entrepreneurialism is neither academia-born nor academic-centric. The grassroots prosperity is only a byproduct of entrepreneurial philosophy based real value creation productivity models and not confused with solely money-making-schemes economic models of value-manipulation. Universities and colleges best for academics are simply not qualified to transform entrepreneurialism on a large scale. Observe why it is always the entrepreneurial leadership that builds an enterprise, therefore, not having entrepreneurial representation at major economic decisions is a serious mistake.
The reputational risk and social downside of patronage is a non-starter and borders on the strawman fallacy. The solution is obvious, give anonymously.