give me money

I’m going to get in trouble for the title on this thing, which is meant to be a bit satirical. A helpful reader sent me a link to this abstract in the provocatively-named journal Accountability in Research, which argues that the costs of (a) preparing NSERC grant applications (a cost borne by applicants) and (b) sifting through grant applications in peer review to decide which are worthy (a cost borne by NSERC) is so onerous that it would be cheaper just to give every qualified scientist a $30,000 baseline grant. Here’s their abstract in full; to me, just about every part of it is intriguing: