re-ward/sponsiblity?

In academic settings, it seems that the "teaching culture" sometimes leads participants to think of grant-awards and manuscript-authorships as accomplishments instead of as responsibilities.  This has a number of interesting consequences.

In the area of grant-awards, that reward emphasis puts the focus on how much money one manages to capture instead of what one actually does with it. Instead of being an incentive to get as much done as possible with as little expenditure, it therefore serves as an incentive to attract as much funding as possible to spend.  To the extent that getting stuff done is a pre-requisite to attracting funds, the two are coupled, but the approach nonetheless may put the cart before the horse.  One consequence is that skill at doing stuff with minimal cost may be far from priority one.

In the area of manuscript-authorships, the reward emphasis puts the focus on the author instead of on the ideas in a manuscript.  Again the importance of the two may be correlated, but not always. One prediction in this context is that papers which evolve conventional wisdom are likely to first be made available e.g. on e-print archives before they are considered worthy of awards to their authors.  This is a good thing, since it gives ideas (the horse) a chance to spread before folks start worrying about which author (the cart) deserves what.