181–190 of 291 posts
If the elite universities are getting this much in funding and have an almost infinite amount of reserves, why don’t they just make the school free to attend? It makes so much sense, creates enormous good will and increases competition thereby getting even better students. They can charge for boarding and food may be and waive the tuition if needed
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Harvard produced many of the people that built a society with staggering and increasing levels of income inequality. Consultants, hedge fund managers, architects of super addictive social media platforms, politicians who write laws favoring corporations over workers, etc. etc.
> [...] increasing levels of income inequality. What exactly are you talking about? Global inequality has been on a downward trend in the last few decades.
Because income and wealth inequality has been steadily increasing in (almost)all developed countries
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Are you being serious? I thought that trickle-down economics theory was pretty much debunked in the eyes of most of the nonelite people.
I never said trickledown economics. I just said that inequality doesn't hurt people. Some rich person having a 5 star steak dinner doesn't take anything away from how much I enjoyed my own dinner. It's not a zero sum game where a rich person enjoying something takes away from what I enjoy.
But extreme inequality is also very unhealthy for society. People with less get exploited. People with more feel entitled to exploit them.
Who cares what some rich guy's vanity spend is. You might argue it's not impactful, but it certainly doesn't hurt anyone.
Also a criminal who will likely end up in jail at some point. His companies aren't exactly uncontroversial. There's a reason people call this guy (Ken Griffin) Madoff 2.0
Side topic. Is it better for society to give 300mil to an ivy league. Or start a new university?
Modern universities are also a heck of a lot more complex than 150 years ago. Same as modern sports teams, there was a period where those are also just founded by a company as a side arm.
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Are you being serious? I thought that trickle-down economics theory was pretty much debunked in the eyes of most of the nonelite people.
I never said trickledown economics. I just said that inequality doesn't hurt people. Some rich person having a 5 star steak dinner doesn't take anything away from how much I enjoyed my own dinner. It's not a zero sum game where a rich person enjoying something takes away from what I enjoy.
I feel like paying for a new college at Oxford or Cambridge is a better use of money. They'll rename a graduate school at the drop of a hat, but John I de Balliol and Walter de Merton aren't too far off having had their name live on for almost 1,000 years now
There is that story about KLF actually setting fire to a million pounds [1]. Why don’t the ultra rich give away more money? Why do they spend it on super yachts, houses with 50 bathrooms, and horridly expensive luxury trinkets? Even more to the point, why do they just hang on to vast sums of money they don’t need in bank accounts or other investments? My conclusion is that there isn’t a reason, in the same way that t…
Burning a million quid in some thing like housing, on the other hand, selfishly removes wealth from society and the economy.
I definitely don't think the big schools like Harvard/Yale/etc. need any more money, but I will play devil's advocate here. > "he donated $300 million in such as a way as to do as close as possible to zero good with it." Oh there are a lot worse ways to spend it with the best of intentions. The Turkana frozen-fish plant is a classic example, a charitable project where back in around 1975 around $150 million (in today…
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Eh, education is mostly bad for society. In the sense, that most of education is about signalling, and funneling more money into education just fuels the arms race. See Bryan Caplan's Case against Education for more details. (The part of education that's actually about learning has mostly become cheaper than ever, thanks to the power of the Internet. But unless you got a piece of paper from a university, hiring manag…
I have a theory that every internet comment that starts with Eh is always wrong. So far I haven't been let down. I don't understand how you could possibly say education has negative impact on society. Top universities can and do hire faculty for the purpose of research alongside teaching. Top minds performing research obviously benefits everyone as they can make new discoveries and innovations. That has the side effe…