The difference is giving more power to researchers directly and side-stepping university administration and overhead. See: https://www.nsf.gov/policies/document/indirect-cost-rate
I've received some individual grants from private foundations in another country. Those grants were essentially unconditional gifts, as there were some tax benefits with such grants. I could have spent the funding period surfing in Bali instead of doing research, and nobody would have had the standing to complain.
Things change if the funder wants to maintain control over how the money is spent. Once there are regulations and compliance requirements, things become risky for the individual. If you end up in a situation, where a reasonable person would employ a lawyer or another professional, it's safer to have a legal entity between you and the funder.
I'd argue that this is one of the advantages of Anglo and Anglo-American culture that has become eroded over time. I've been reading about the British East India Company and how much discretion employees were afforded in carrying out their work: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/mar/04/east-india-com.... They had like 35 employees in London and managed to take over Mughal India, which was a gunpowder empire with guns, cannons, 4-5x the state revenues and 25x the population of Britain. Pound for pound it's probably one of the most effective organizations in history.
The EIC overthrew a gunpowder empire with vast resources and one of the largest militaries in the world with 1,000 European soldiers and a few dozen administrators in London. There's incredible lessons in there, orthogonal to whatever you're talking about.
That said, effectiveness actually is a frequent shortcut to goodness, in that effectiveness often leads to efficiency and efficiency is one of the best methods of indiscriminate uplifting of people in an otherwise unfair and imbalanced world.
I’m not sure what historians could debate here. The EIC ultimately failed as a business once it became a government—the costs of governing wiped out the profits from the trade monopoly. But the administrative achievements are undeniable.
This is evident from undisputed historical facts. In the mid-18th century, England’s per capita GDP was only about double that of the Mughal Empire’s. The Mughals themselves were an organized, sophisticated, Persianate Empire with a centralized. bureaucracy. The technological advantage was incremental: e.g. iron cannons versus bronze cannons, standardized ammunition, etc. But the Mughals had vastly more manpower and state revenues. In the Anglo Mughal War, the Mughals obliterated the EIC forces with a 500,000 man army. Less than 75 years later, the EIC took over the Mughal Empire with just a few thousand European soldiers. It never had more than 35,000 European soldiers in India. That’s a crazy achievement. It would be like Amazon putting together a private army and taking over the EU.
I love watching the “making of Disneyland” movies they have on Disney+. Really captures the American spirit of just doing stuff.