From regulatory capture through revolving doors and lobbying, to media capture through purchase, and now academic capture through donation, it seems no activity is safe from large concentrations of wealth.
Universities have been dirty since they embraced price gouging on tuition in the 90's. There is no way what they are providing can be considered fair or reasonable.
I don't think tuition is the problem (in this case!); it's the endless need for "fundraising". If you need to get huge gifts, inevitably you will be corrupted by the needs/wants of the gift givers.
Huh, and where does that big amount come from? By taking huge donations. Its like saying Apple can sell iPhone for free since they are insanely rich. They are reach because they charge large amount of money for a fucking phone. Money either increases or decreases its not gonna stay at same level.
> since they embraced price gouging on tuition in the 90's.
(Caveat that the following is US-centric.) I'd love to see the data showing actual price gouging, because the data I've seen has generally suggested that per-student spending hasn't even increased at a pace equivalent to inflation; rather, funding didn't increase with enrolment, leading to students paying for an ever-higher share of their education.
(As for private universities... fine, I'm okay calling it price gouging.)
I used to work in Institutional Research at a state university and at least for state school's tuition tracks pretty closely to the cost of education. In my time working there, our funding from the state was reduced by 30%.
Generally Non-resident tuition is the cost it takes to educate a student. Resident tuition is cheaper because it's subsidized by the state. Every year we would get less and less funding from the state and would have to shift more burden to the student. We implemented furlough days, and cut admin staff compensation to attempt to reduce the tuition burden on students. We still had to raise Tuition faster than inflation in the end.
There is no reason why my adjunct professor spending 45 minutes a week, twice a week for a few months, in some old building, should cost me and 70 other people $3000 each. The tuition problem is one of bloat and greed.
That's nearly a quarter million dollars, of which the professor is probably getting a few thousand. where is the other $200k+ going?
I worked as an adjunct about 10 years ago and ~$2k per class was the pay. With a full class load that came out to a little over $2k per month. Definitely more work than 90mins per week per class though. 4 courses per term was definitely a full-time job.
So yeah, not a lot of tuition is making it to the low rung teachers.
That’s not the point. Corruption (which is what this is) is NOT binary, it’s a problem that exists on spectrum.
We don’t solve spectrum problems, we reduce and minimize them. Just because they exist to a degree and never are remediated doesn’t mean we shouldn’t seek to minimize them.
Corruption can lead to tax evasion, poor tax administration, and exemptions that disproportionately favor the well-connected and wealthy population groups in society and must be rallied against if we seek civil societies.
We’ll never get rid of it. As you say. But if we don’t act against it these problems will grow like cancer and become insidious, infecting every aspect of society, so it’s deeply important not to embrace an apathetic approach or present them as inevitable.
They are intrinsic, but the level we tolerate — the “degree of corruption” — which I would argue is pretty high in this case, is most certainly counterable and definitely can be reduced.
Well, you can prevent the concentration of wealth in the first place.
Thomas Jefferson wrote, "But the consequences of this enormous inequality producing so much misery to the bulk of mankind, legislators cannot invent too many devices for subdividing property....Another means of silently lessening the inequality of property is to exempt all from taxation below a certain point, and to tax the higher portions of property in geometrical progression as they rise"[0].
It is very good and useful to actually ignore a reasonable question and engage in any discussion they might contradict your way of thinking and instead point and yell at things that literally aren’t representative of what was posed.
What a joke. It didn’t used to be this way in the US and we weren’t North Korea then, but okay. Point at a bogeyman and accept the status quo (to the benefit of those with unimaginable wealth by the way, of which they aren’t going to give you any for defending them.) instead of I considering how to make a world where things are better for everyone.
The good old "we have always been that way". If perhaps hard to imagine for you, there are tons of social structures where wealth cannot be used to purchase power (ie where currency buys you some stuff but not labor from other humans). See the recent book https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dawn_of_Everything. Very much a perspective changing book.
I’m going to guess that not many of those social structures achieved things like low infant mortality, not dying from randomly stubbing your toe, the internet, space travel, and the like. If I was presented with a choice, I’d pick a modern Western state any time, flawed as they may be.
Your argument is a straw-man. You're conflating taking inspiration from something and adopting it verbatim (your first two examples are particularly hilarious in this regard). Also i've yet to find a compelling argument defending that western capitalism is a necessity for high-tech (you second two examples). In particular schools, academia and software are fields where not commercial-centric relationships are thriving and deemed superior by a fair share of practitioners.
>> From regulatory capture through revolving doors and lobbying, to media capture through purchase, and now academic capture through donation, it seems no activity is safe from large concentrations of wealth.
> And it never will be. This is a human problem. No amount of laws and regulations will ever solve it.
Come on. Wealth is literally a creature of "law and regulations," and changes to them can definitely "solve it." That's trivially shown by the through a thought experiment where we imagine legal changes that lead to Zuckerberg having his wealth confiscated and Facebook being placed under the control of some person or entity who is not its ally and is not allowed to profit from it.
I think I need to make extra-clear that my example is an extreme one to clearly disprove your point, not the only regulatory option available or a policy proposal. Don't get distracted by irrelevant details.
Defeatist memes like what you said circulate widely to encourage paralysis, but they're propaganda or its derivatives, not truth.
We shouldn't sit on our hands or whatever but wealth isn't a creation of laws, it's a bit of the inverse. Some laws can remove wealth and some laws are gonna take a lotta of guns and manpower (resources ==wealth) to implement.
> We shouldn't sit on our hands or whatever but wealth isn't a creation of laws, it's a bit of the inverse.
Huh? Maybe in the deep, deep past; but definitely not now. Even back then, where there were no states and little social organization, there was still custom within groups that worked like law.
> Some laws can remove wealth and some laws are gonna take a lotta of guns and manpower (resources ==wealth) to implement.
Zuckerberg and Facebook have no army and no means to raise one, despite the wealth they have. They are totally, utterly at the mercy of laws and regulations.
Mark Zuckerburg's wealth is absolutely a creation of laws. Almost all of his wealth comes from his ownership of a corporation. The corporation only exists because of laws. It is only a sale-able asset because of laws.
what if we had laws that prevented people from obtaining disproportionate amounts of wealth? Seems like it'd be a lot harder to buy a school if being a multi-billionaire is impossible.
This is such a naive viewpoint. Let's say that people are not allowed to have more than 10 million dollars, but corporations are. Then it wouldn't be Zuckerberg's money, it would simply be Facebook's, wielded by Zuckerberg.
I hope you can see the ridiculousness is saying that corporations should be limited in wealth as well, but even if you can't, let's assume they are limited the same. Now it becomes easier to buy them off, because they are comparably smaller.
The only logical solution is to allow both corporations and individuals to accumulate as much wealth as they are able to. Rich people aren't the problem, corrupt people are. Instead of trying to make rich corrupt people less rich, why don't we try to make them less corrupt instead?
Foreign entities? Of course, we should ban that as long as we’re at it. Next you’ll have people using vastly superior foreign products, we better ban that as well. And if people decide to leave the country en masse because they’re too morally weak and desire wealth, we can’t have that either, so better build a wall.
> We should just tax income over $10 million at 90% for both people and corporations.
People - maybe. But why corporations? Isn’t that double taxation? The only way money leaves a corporation is through people which will be taxed eventually.
As for the healthcare system, it doesn’t need more money. It needs an extreme regulation and red tape shake up. We could have vastly better healthcare today for the same amount of money that’s already there if not for the bureaucratic mess and an army of administrators tending to it.
That would tip the balance of power to another corrupting influence. Corporations, say. Or professional associations representing highly-educated high earners like doctors or lawyers. Or to politically savvy deca-millionaires who use their money with more focused attention. And that's setting aside the question of how and whether you could prevent the existence of billionaires, which would lead to offshoring and (plausibly at least) dramatic unintended changes in what kinds of social and technological change happens. But either way, coalitions corrupting institutions is not a soluble problem generally. It gets solved with acts of effort and courage like this one, and by discussions like this.
> That would tip the balance of power to another corrupting influence. Corporations, say. Or professional associations representing highly-educated high earners like doctors or lawyers.
Even if what you say is true, which I do not grant, your implication is akin to "we should not punish criminals, because some other criminals will rise to take their place." It's a defeatist meme that mainly serves to protect the interests of the already-powerful.
Some work is never done, but that is not a reason to give up on it.
Loopholes will be found, wealth will be concentrated in new ways, and then the wealth will be used to revert laws to benefit the wealthy. The laws won't change in the first place since money has captured most political systems as well.
Yes, give up and don't try, on the scale of things you will be dead and forgotten anyways - a failure in every sense of the word regardless of what you do.
Even people famous in their time are forgotten in short order. A good lesson for those deluding themselves into thinking they'll be an exception. Better to be remembered as a decent human being to your loved ones.
Politics (as in the game of power) and corruption are human nature. Pushing back against these are equally human nature. The worse it gets the more intense the push back. The push back seems to be at moment taking the shape of voting in far right or trump like politicians accross the world. They won't solve the issue. Therefore the next level of intensity may very well be revolution.
imho, you're wrong:
it may not be "human nature" as much as it is prisoner's dilemma.
few, but some, humans are just as inherently averse to corruption as someone may be inherently prone to it. it's a matter of "if I don't take this bribe, someone else will"
That is still human nature. Not everyone will exhibit those traits, but when looking at the entirety of humanity, these traits are certainly part of our nature.
And the prisoner's dilemma is a way of exploring/explaining these traits (though I expect these aren't exclusive to humans).
hmm. I suppose a sentient ant may not reach a Nash equilibrium, but the best equilibrium. Then through that lens, yeah. I can see how you see it as human nature.
Clarify what do you mean by "revolution", because to me that words means either a coup, civil war, acts of terrorism, or, worse than that, a massacre like China's "cultural revolution".
Any of those I imagine, perhaps all. When things reach boiling point pressure has to be released somehow. And as it stands things are under quite some pressure as of recently.
