The folks over at Balloon Juice are mocking John McCain’s proposal of an “X-Prize”-like monetary prize incentive for developing more efficient batteries. The general thrust of criticism is that if you’re going to have government investment in business, better to have it targeted for research efforts that pay off faster than as an undirected, unorganized “prize” that no serious research team would consider worthy of the effort (since the payoff in designing a better battery is having patents on the better battery, not the three hundred million smackers).
This isn’t entirely incorrect, but it overlooks the one definite plus of an X-Prize-like incentive; it widens and democratizes research effort. It was only about a century ago that the majority of invention was done by talented amateurs – and this during the Gilded Age, remember.
My favorite example is probably the Wright Brothers, who invented powered heavier-than-air flight on their own; they were distinctly not part of the research community involved in designing heavier-than-air flying machines, so much so that it took over thirty years for the Smithsonian to recognize that they actually invented it. They had no scientific background and essentially invented the basic theory of propellor aerodynamics because nobody else had done it.
What other Wrights could be lurking in the background, needing only an incentive, however meager and illusory it might be, to kickstart their heads? For that reason alone, X-Prizes are worth pursuing as part of any environmental or energy technology strategy.
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I hear about these big prizes for various achievements all the time but then I neaver hear about them again. It’s like he’s dooming the electric car by putting a bounty on its head.
The flip side of that argument is that our understanding of physics and chemistry has gotten so complex that anybody operating at an amateur level doesn’t have either the level of education to strike new ground or the resources to manage the large amount of data involved. Informatics has become a very important part of any research effort of late and that requires a level of organization in which you don’t see amateurs.
Well, the X-prices that Nasa put up a few years back seemed to work wonders! Already a few people have claimed the bounties (and I suppose the suitably useful contracts that comes with it).
I think it is a brilliant idea. Competition is at the heart of humanity…
I think the idea is crap, and some of the commenters over at Balloon Juice have already done a fine job of explaining why.
“– Well, the X-prices that Nasa put up a few years back seemed to work wonders! Already a few people have claimed the bounties (and I suppose the suitably useful contracts that comes with it). –”
Yes, but it wasn’t the money that was the driving factor. A $2.5 mil prize would barely cover the cost of research and development on shoestring budgets. NASA could just as easily have offered a ride in the Space Shuttle or a job as a NASA engineer or any number of other incentives and spurred the same sort of competition. Hell, NASA could have simply thrown down the gauntlet and had some ranking engineer proclaim it was completely impractical for any novice engineer to design a vehicle capable of launching vertically, hovering, and landing 100 feet away. Hot shot grad students and garage geniuses would have lined up around the block to prove him wrong.
McCain’s $300 mil pitch isn’t about spurring innovation. It’s about throwing money at a national problem in hopes that someone other than him will make it go away. He’s not proposing research grants to universities or comprehensive reforms to US Energy policy or innovative strategies for US automakers. He’s not shaping public policy in the least. In short, he’s not governing. This is the same sort of half-assed thinking that got us such brilliant ideas as “Let’s deregulate the electricity companies and banking industry” and “Let’s give big fat tax cuts to oil companies to do more exploration.” You get shit like Enron and $4 / gallon gas with this sort of approach.
Most of the points I was going to make have already been commented on. To follow up on NCallahan, most of the X-Prize type of goals a century ago were addressed by not simply “amateurs,” but wealthy, well eduacated amateurs, at a time when the depth and breadth of most technical fields was much much smaller than now. Most such goals now are addressed by well-funded teams- funded either by individuals such as Dick Rutan (a renowned aeronautical engineer) or corporations looking for one more surface on which to plaster their logos.
McCain is, to be kind, economically naive. Tens of millions are being poured into developing better battery technology as we speak. Why? Because the economic payoff will be extraordinay. The point of setting an “X-Prize” sort of goal is to encourage people to make some sort of achievement that is not widely perceived as having massive economic paybacks, but might lead to further steps that would have such payouts. In other words, paraphrasing an old saying, to take the first step in a journey of a thousand miles.
Furthermore, the question of “battery” simply begs the much more fundamental question, “where’s the energy to charge the battery going to come from?”