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It allows more people to do it as a career if the funding goes partially towards salaries. That goes a long way towards making more progress in more fields.

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I'm starting to come to the idea that the rate of progress is more driven by the rate of adoption than by number of researchers.

It takes a whole lot of implementation and organisation to make any innovation tangible, so in some ways a bigger overall society slows things down as much as you gain from the total number of researchers.

Competition from foreign societies is also a part of this.

I'd say that's true after a certain point in any specific field. But there are so many fields that do show some future promise with only a few people doing research at any one time. I think a bit more breath of search will do us well

So how much faster is our progress now compared with 1960?

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