I read a good study that suggested that so much time and effort (and hence money) is wasted on writing proposals for non-funded grants we should just assign a sizable fraction of the money by lottery instead, without needing lengthy proposals. Everyone knows you use the money for other stuff not specific to the grant regardless. The opportunity cost of writing all the rejected proposals would be saved and could be spent on actual science, even if some of it isn't top notch that otherwise would have been funded (and thats assuming that the grant proposal system actually selects the stuff mostly likely to be ground breaking).
Yeah I agree, I would like to see some percentage be lottery based. I think you should still need to write a proposal, but if the proposal isn't selected then it goes in the lottery pool. There are two reasons to still write the proposal: helps organize the researcher's thoughts and shows the researcher is serious.
