This sounds pretty sensible to me. On the other hand, if people are worried about it being harder for people who are already less plugged in to networks to get funding, you might not want an additional dimension on which these harder-to-evaluate grants could lose out compared to easier to evaluate ones (where the latter end up having a lower minimum threshold).
It also might create quite a bit of extra overhead for granters having to decide the opportunity cost case by case, which could reduce the number of grants they can make, or again push towards easier to evaluate ones.
I tend to think that the network constraints are better addressed by solutions other than ad-hoc fixes (such as more proactive investigations of grantees), though I agree it’s a concern and it updates me a bit towards this not being a good idea.
I wasn’t suggesting deciding the opportunity cost case by case. Instead, grant evaluators could assume a fixed cost of e.g. $2k. In terms of estimating the benefit of making the grant, I think they do that already to some extent by providing numerical ratings to grants (as Oliver explains here). Also, being aware of the $10k rule already creates a small amount of work. Overall, I think the additional amount of work seems negligibly small.
ETA: Setting a lower threshold would allow us to a) avoid turning down promising grants, and b) remove an incentive to ask for too much money. That seems pretty useful to me.
This sounds pretty sensible to me. On the other hand, if people are worried about it being harder for people who are already less plugged in to networks to get funding, you might not want an additional dimension on which these harder-to-evaluate grants could lose out compared to easier to evaluate ones (where the latter end up having a lower minimum threshold).
It also might create quite a bit of extra overhead for granters having to decide the opportunity cost case by case, which could reduce the number of grants they can make, or again push towards easier to evaluate ones.
I tend to think that the network constraints are better addressed by solutions other than ad-hoc fixes (such as more proactive investigations of grantees), though I agree it’s a concern and it updates me a bit towards this not being a good idea.
I wasn’t suggesting deciding the opportunity cost case by case. Instead, grant evaluators could assume a fixed cost of e.g. $2k. In terms of estimating the benefit of making the grant, I think they do that already to some extent by providing numerical ratings to grants (as Oliver explains here). Also, being aware of the $10k rule already creates a small amount of work. Overall, I think the additional amount of work seems negligibly small.
ETA: Setting a lower threshold would allow us to a) avoid turning down promising grants, and b) remove an incentive to ask for too much money. That seems pretty useful to me.