Happily devoured new "Arts and Minds," a history of the RSA. Its early model is a striking combo:
1. Leverage philanthropic/status motive: crowdsource a fund from nobles/"risers"
2. Leverage self-interest: offer prizes to inventors
3. Grant-making by direct democracy
Conversation
But… why did grant-making-by-vote work?
RSA was insistent that anyone could join—not just learned/nobles—if they paid into the fund. Why did this produce a member pool which made good funding decisions?
Not obvious that this would work! i.e. What if NSF used direct democracy?
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Have u finished it already?!
Risk of factions taking over through entryism was definitely real, as per the artists in Chapter 2. But some procedures helped reduce that.
I think the main discipline was from membership number. If things went badly wrong, subscribers pulled out.
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Yes, er, last weekend. :) I enjoyed seeing how factionism played out (surprised it wasn't more damaging). But—why was their activity competent in the first place, irrespective of faction? If you took a slice of equivalent wealth in modern Britain, would they vote for wise prizes?
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I guess one possibility is that they weren’t always so good! But perhaps longer it was around and scandals outlasted, the more those who were most interested in fields self-selected. Members of, say, the mechanics committee were actually some of the best engineers in the country.
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I would LOVE to see this tried out again today. In theory should be very doable, especially given the internet gets rid of the need to all be in a certain place (unless there was something about the sociability around the events, face-to-face that made it work...)
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Replying to
I wonder if one factor is that there's a thicker middle class today. Like: the 18thC RSA involved "manufacturers" and "artisans," but maybe it was so much harder to be such a person back then that they'd be at the 90th percentile of similar roles today?