Venkatesh Rao

Now that model is struggling, I have to wonder why huge capital stocks created from that legacy investment aren’t being plowed back into the head of the funnel. Possibly SV has gotten used to easy private wealth building off of publicly funded feedstock.

I think the R&D loop can be closed with tech wealth and investment capital. Universities can be unbundled. There’s no good reason to keep teaching, research, and service in the same costly brick and mortar bundle anymore.

I bet every top 5 VC, PE, and Big Tech firm could each sustain 20% NSF CAREER type indie research network, 3x-ing total R&D bandwidth of the US. With expectations of open source/license output. Restock the commons without need for big 60s/70s style government programs.

I’d revamp publishing, peer review models, etc, as well, since the model that exists is failing even for university research (hence reproducibility crisis, impact factor gaming, purely cronyism predatory journal empires etc) but that’s a secondary mechanism design problem.

Income-share education models already exist and offer a competitive alternative to the teaching function of universities and get out of the unsustainable student debt balloon. R&D can be unbundled too.

What’s the alternative? The innovation economy finally kills the dying golden goose for the last few golden eggs, and enters a late stage fraud economy competing with NIMBY grifters in decaying urban cores. Stockbuybackitis infects SV too. The music stops.

In this picture the traditional university doesn’t get disrupted so much as have its role refactored into a sort of infrastructure cloud provisioning role. I’d expect much of this sort of thing to happen in university ecosystems actually.

There’s probably a way this solves the adjunct crisis too, but I’ll leave that for another day (it’s an overlapping population but not coextensive with indie research target population... maybe 30% overlap)