I agree that it's possible to preserve many of the benefits of competition under a more centralized and explicitly cooperative structure. You see this sometimes within large for-profit companies that have competing products, which are siloed from each other in the workplace. This works fine, because there is still a profit motive at work and the identical evolutionary forces that will kill a particular silo if it's underperforming, and the same competitive pressure to perform.
Much larger cooperative structures are less proven to work and are more hypothetical, though, even if CERN is an example of such a structure working. The risk, mainly, is that there isn't a good corrective mechanism if the whole thing becomes corrupted or rotten from the top. The other risk is that the cooperation is actually detrimental to progress because it correlates outcomes via group think. Some decorrelation is nice. I am happy that Musk et al. weren't forced to become cogs at NASA, and could explore their own ideas, which was easier to achieve by then being explicitly separate entities (even if they were reliant on contracts).
> This works fine, because there is still a profit motive at work and the identical evolutionary forces that will kill a particular silo if it's underperforming, and the same competitive pressure to perform.
the profit motive in a multinationally funded system is still there in the sense of 'we have a budget of X, what's the best way to spend it?'. And research avenues that fail to yield the expected results can be terminated. In my experience, disagreement between researchers or groups were also far from uncommon. But maybe that's just physicists being exceptionally knowitall^H^H^H hard to convince :)
It's not flawless, but I don't think it could be less efficient use of public money than the current system where we publically fund early research and the succesfull projects get snatched up by the industry, patented, and sold for large profits. Even if a lot of pharmaceutical research ends up going nowhere (or a competitor beats them to it), we still end up paying for it trough the profit margins of the parent companies.
Raising healthcare costs are a serious concern for many countries, and part pharmaceuticals are a non-trivial part of the cost. Researching and producing them locally might help reduce that cost and stimulate a broader healthcare industry.
I do fear that pharmaceutical research might be to politicized for a multinational approach(e.g. HIV, what disease to prioritize). And there's bound to be some backlash from certain groups over a large 'shadowy' multinational body doing human trials.
Much larger cooperative structures are less proven to work and are more hypothetical, though, even if CERN is an example of such a structure working. The risk, mainly, is that there isn't a good corrective mechanism if the whole thing becomes corrupted or rotten from the top. The other risk is that the cooperation is actually detrimental to progress because it correlates outcomes via group think. Some decorrelation is nice. I am happy that Musk et al. weren't forced to become cogs at NASA, and could explore their own ideas, which was easier to achieve by then being explicitly separate entities (even if they were reliant on contracts).