Hi all. Welcome back to nine whole uninterrupted weeks of the blog. Let’s get to it.

A couple of weeks ago, I mused about the possibility of individual universities using philanthropic dollars to start poaching some talented researchers wanting out from the United States. Now comes news that the University Health Network—the super-hospital network that in research functions as a massive force multiplier to the University of Toronto’s medical school—is trying to hire 100 top early career researchers from around the world. In theory this is global but there’s no disguising the undertone of “holy shit a lot of great talent is going cheap right now.” Cue the usual debate about the value of bringing in new researchers into our existing, cash-strapped system.

The pro- side of this debate is simple: more talented researchers = good!. The anti-position on this debate is also simple: we don’t have enough money to sustain the researchers we already have up here, and adding more people—even very talented ones—in such a moment, spreading money out ever-thinner makes a bad situation worse. 

Which side is right? Let’s game this out a bit.

So, first of all, the “money is tight” argument is certainly true, but, I would argue, slightly incomplete. First of all (and obviously this depends on the election outcome) the 2024 budget commitments on research actually start to kick in after 2026 so If the Liberals win, or if the Conservatives win and decide to implement the Liberal budget framework (less likely on both counts), then there will be more money in the system than at present. Maybe not all that much, certainly not enough to fund a better research ecosystem, but it’s still a few hundred million extra when the budget hits steady state in 2028-29. Enough, certainly, to accommodate a few newcomers, without necessarily taking money away from existing researchers.

Second, the metaphor of “spreading money thinly” is probably misleading in an important way. And it’s worth being explicit about this in order to more clearly understand the trade-offs of organized poaching from US universities. 

Let’s say there are about 10,000 researchers who receive money from the Canadian Institutes for Health Research, or CIHR (the argument is similar for other disciplines, but for the moment let’s stick to health). And let’s say Canada, or rather Canadian institutions in the aggregate, want to recruit say 300 or 400 of them—that is, to increase the size of the researcher pool by three or four percent. The “spreading ever thinner” metaphor suggests that all the current researchers would continue to receive money, and all new researchers would receive money, too. Everyone would thus be getting about 96 cents on the current dollar. This would be bad for Canadian researchers, and would probably still be disappointing to our newcomers, who might find CIHR grants comically small compared to what they are used to from the National Institutes of Health.

I am fairly certain, however, that this would not be how things shake out. Holding budgets constant, there’s no necessary reason CIHR would increase the number of grants in response to an increase in the number of people asking for money. More likely, they would keep the number of grants constant. Money would thus not be “spread thinner”; rather, the newcomers would thus be squeezing out some domestic researchers.

Some might view this as a self-evidently bad result (“Americans pushing out Canadians”) but seen from the position of the national interest, I am not sure that is true. Pushing some domestic researchers out of funding should indeed be labelled as a “cost,” both to themselves and to the nation; but whether or not these costs are offset by gains depends in large part on where these newcomers would sit in the distribution of talent. If those 300 or 400 newcomers have the same profile of scientific talent as existing Canadian researchers, and didn’t provide much of an upgrade, that’s one thing. But if they mostly clustered in the top decile of scientific talent, that’s something completely different: it would represent a major talent gain. And since every funding agency wants its pool of money, however large or small, to have the largest possible impact, then regardless of funding levels, this talent gain would seem to be a no-brainer.

But—and here’s where it gets, shall we say, “icky”—is that no one wants to compare researcher quality. It’s all about access to money, some will claim. Newcomers’ better track records might just be down to all that NIH money they could access, some may say, and that there is nothing newcomers could do that domestic researchers couldn’t do, if only they had enough money. And who knows, they might be right. I suspect that this is mostly copium, but it is a view that appears to be shared by many.

I think in this debate it is important to acknowledge three things. First, regardless of whether we start poaching US-based researchers, more money in the research ecosystem would be better than less. But also, second, at any given level of research funding, Canada would be better off with a more talented pool of researchers to spend the money. And also, third, raising the bar through poaching means that some specific researchers (but impossible to know who in advance) will likely lose funding entirely, and this, too, would represent a cost to the system.

Reasonable people can disagree about whether or how best to move forward with an organized poaching scheme. But if we want this to be a productive debate, one in which people actually listen to each other’s arguments, it is important to understand the basic trade-offs involved.