Suppose you wanted to arrange to give the top 10% or so of math Ph.D.s who graduate from Oxford the sort of no-strings-attached five-year grant you were talking about. How would you set up the decision process for deciding which graduates to award the grants to? Would the divisional chair at Oxford assign the grants? Would the graduate students vote on who should get them? Would the Royal Society choose the recipients?
I don't want to claim that nobody was trying to influence your opinion about who the best students were, when you were at Oxford; of course it's common for people to tout their own achievements and those of their friends. But I suspect that if you were in the position of directing millions of dollars a year of no-strings-attached funding, and people knew that, the amount of effort that went into influencing your opinion would be an order of magnitude greater, and might be sufficient to confuse you.
(This pickle is presumably obvious to you but the solution to the pickle isn't obvious to me, so I'm hoping you can outline a solution.)
This kind of decision is already routinely made by committees awarding NSF postdocs, Clay fellowships, etc. What's wrong with the process they use (and independent expert panel)? Do you think they select the wrong mathematicians?
cperciva's criticism of this process is, as I understand it, that the grants they give are too short, and that this, together with the selection criteria, creates a too-strong incentive to pursue short-term, low-risk results.
I don't want to claim that nobody was trying to influence your opinion about who the best students were, when you were at Oxford; of course it's common for people to tout their own achievements and those of their friends. But I suspect that if you were in the position of directing millions of dollars a year of no-strings-attached funding, and people knew that, the amount of effort that went into influencing your opinion would be an order of magnitude greater, and might be sufficient to confuse you.
(This pickle is presumably obvious to you but the solution to the pickle isn't obvious to me, so I'm hoping you can outline a solution.)