I also agree that Harvard doesn’t need any more money, but…

You notice something in that article, which is that Harvard is almost twice the size of the next largest school in that article’s list of richest schools per student. The undergraduate part of Harvard is extremely small and exclusive. Griffin gave the money to the graduate school of arts and sciences, which is actively building the capacity to serve more students. They’re building what is effectively a second campus on the Boston side of the river, with even more land than they have in Cambridge.

But extreme inequality is also very unhealthy for society. People with less get exploited. People with more feel entitled to exploit them.

When the shareholders are people with a long-term stake in the company, like the founders, they can make long-term decisions or choose not to want the absolute most profit-maximizing thing because actually they're already pretty rich and maybe some things are more important.

When they're fund managers, they want quarterly profits because that's how they get their bonus, and their fund may not even own shares in that company in a year's time.

Fund managers want perhaps to see quarterly profits for their fund, but that's not the same thing as quarterly profits at the underlying companies. Your fund can also profit, if the stock prices of the underlying companies rise.

To give some existence proofs, have a look at how Amazon, Microsoft, Google, Tesla etc had rising share prices long before they ever returned any money to shareholders.

Or how shortly into the covid pandemic market prices for stocks recovered, even though the pandemic wasn't over at all: that was purely based on investors looking to the longer term future.

> [...] and their fund may not even own shares in that company in a year's time.

For that to happen, they need to sell the company to someone else, and that other person will pay more for a company with a bright future.

This is why almost every sector of the economy is dominated by a few large firms.

This was also true of Juicero and Pets.com.

Moreover, the people investing in small startups are generally not huge funds. The funds buy in after the company is established. Tesla turned a profit before they were added to the S&P 500.

> For that to happen, they need to sell the company to someone else, and that other person will pay more for a company with a bright future.

Most of the scam comes from information asymmetries. The current owners hire managers who they know will boost short-term prospects in a conspicuous way by damaging long-term prospects in subtle and hidden ways, e.g. by removing slack that increases short-term efficiency but is an existential risk to the company if anything goes wrong. This makes the company look like it's in better shape than it is to less than fully informed investors (also known as investors) and allows you to sell the shares to them for more than the company would be worth if they fully understood the risks they were taking.

Yes, it's hard to predict the future.

> Moreover, the people investing in small startups are generally not huge funds. The funds buy in after the company is established. Tesla turned a profit before they were added to the S&P 500.

One reason those small startups can attract capital in the first place, is because their early investors can reasonably expect to cash out by selling to huge funds once the company gets established.

Remove the late investors, and you dry up the payouts for early investors.

> Most of the scam comes from information asymmetries.

That's hardly news. Investors take that into account.

What keeps investing from turning into a market for lemons is that companies can communicate to prospective investors and show them transparently that they eg didn't remove the slack.

As an investor, you can go by the maxim of 'guilty, unless proven innocent'. So if a company does not have that transparency, you should value them as-if they have skeletons in the closet.

(And if companies explicitly lie, that's already a crime.)

Which only makes the problem worse, because the early investors then have the incentive to create and prop up garbage companies as long as they think they can sell them to do the next guy before the crash. Which is more possible the less the funds need to pay attention to each stock, i.e. the more "diversified" each person's investments are.

> One reason those small startups can attract capital in the first place, is because their early investors can reasonably expect to cash out by selling to huge funds once the company gets established.

The funds are an abstraction over the underlying investors. Right now you have Joe Middle Class who has a retirement account which is invested in thousands of companies he has no incentive to pay any attention to because none of them individually affect his savings by a significant amount. If it was four or five companies, he would have the incentive to keep track of management decisions there. He may even be working for one of them, because he is then using an information asymmetry to his advantage when he knows from the inside how well that company is managed. But then we try to inhibit this kind of thing even though it would make markets more efficient.

The bigger cause of the problem is that companies are huuuge, so that they can't be owned by any reasonable number of people. A trillion dollar company has to be owned by millions of separate individuals because even the 99th percentile individual doesn't have enough wealth to own a significant fraction of a company that size. But why do we need companies to be that big? Break them up. They could have the same total valuation as many separate companies, without each being so unmanageably large.

Potentially even higher total valuations, because the need to do the following is less when each company is smaller and less complicated:

> As an investor, you can go by the maxim of 'guilty, unless proven innocent'. So if a company does not have that transparency, you should value them as-if they have skeletons in the closet.

And that's the point. The transparency isn't possible, not because the company doesn't publish the numbers, but because it's not worth deep diving into their conglomerated operations when they're only 0.2% of your portfolio. And when investors will be doing this regardless of whether the company is actually sacrificing long-term prospects for short-term numbers, the company has the incentive to do just that.

Incremental research is still research. Application research is still research.

The over-emphasis on foundational research from the media & the general public has led to a myopic view of "revolution"-ism, wherein incremental progress in science is considered to be worthless relative to incremental improvements.

The discovery of penicillin was a medical breakthrough, but that doesn't mean that the industrial scale-up of penicillin production was comparatively worthless. In fact, in this specific case, the opposite is true: The benefits of penicillin wouldn't have been received if everyone thought that research into scaling up its production was worthless.

In practice, companies are run for the benefit of their managers.

Especially when they talk about something like 'stakeholder capitalism', because it's inevitable the managers that decide which stakeholders to listen to and how to balance their interests.

More recent examples aren’t as impressive by comparison, but graduates of Harvard school of medicine has collectively done a great deal of critical medical research. And of course many recent graduates have their best breakthroughs ahead of them.

What exactly are you talking about? Global inequality has been on a downward trend in the last few decades.

US has the worst income inequality of all G7 nations and has been on the rise since 1980.

UnAmerican people have moral value, too.

Because income and wealth inequality has been steadily increasing in (almost)all developed countries

However keep in mind that China is still only about as rich as Mexico or Russia in terms of GDP per capita. So hasn't joined the rich world, yet.

Ethnic Chinese people are very successful around the world. Mainland China actually has on average the poorest Chinese people. Compare eg Singapore, Taiwan, or even the ethnic Chinese populations in Thailand or the US.

(Not completely sure about the Chinese people in Thailand. Need to dig up stats.)

I myself migrated to Singapore a few years ago, as I agree with their pro-market policies. We also have great food here. Just the weather is a bit muggy.

> weather is a bit muggy

On a rainy day in England, I can very much sympathise!

Just because eg inequality in the US might have increased, and inequality in China might have increased, doesn't mean that the inequality in their combined population has increased.

I'm talking about the combined population of all humanity.

See eg https://archive.is/7xWtr

Because our local society is the society against which we, as humans, tend to measure ourselves, and inequality within our in-group is the strongest predictor of crime, perhaps?

Why wouldn’t you? The fact that Chinese people are much better off than they were a few decades ago has almost no bearing on the well-being of me, my family, relatives, friends or almost anyone I know.

Increasing inequality in the country I live (or countries I have the right to live in or would ever consider moving to) does.

55% receive needs based scholarships, with families making less than 150k per year paying less than 15k per year.

Sure there are a lot of rich kids and legacies. But to say it only benefits the wealthy is just wrong.

1 - https://college.harvard.edu/guides/financial-aid-fact-sheet

For poor students, Harvard and its peers are pretty much the only free college options besides merit scholarships.

That distribution really is extremely heavily skewed, so I think the original comment is correct, I can't see how it's improving equality.

If 1.8% were poor and Harvard helped them become rich adults, probably 65% were rich and Harvard helped them stay rich as adults.

At least in your fish example they used it for the intended purpose for some period of time and there is still some low utilization for dried fish. It’s also half of 300 million so it seems they did more with less despite it being a failure.

Regardless, effective altruism is bullshit. They can donate the money however they want. They wouldn’t be a better person or even more charitable if they were an “effective altruist.”

Future potential (“women and children first”), societal compliance (criminals vs not), etc.

What you think is objectively better with something as open ended as $300m is completely subjective.

One glaring obvious problem with the EA people, is that they double count.

Say I give money for bed nets, and the bed nets save 100 lives.

But say I only gave that money because Eliezer Yudkowsky convinced me to. Was it really him that saved 100 lives? Or do we divide them between us somehow? How many should go to the people who actually distributed the bed nets I paid for?

You'd think the EA people would have good answers to these questions. Or at least, any answers. But they don't. Not any consistent ones. They cheerfully double-count in all their most famous arguments.

You have to account for it as the marginal dollar, not the average dollar. If Harvard had less money, and they're competent, they would cut the least effective programs. But because their budget is so large, they've already fully funded everything in their wheelhouse with high utility and the least effective programs would be mostly waste and vanity. (And if they're not competent then you obviously don't want to be giving them more money either.)

I'm guessing your intention was to suggest that in the presence of a large surplus (Harvard's massive endowment etc) it is reasonable to assume this goes unspent because it can't be turned into worthwhile education or research. Is that about the sum of the argument?

Meanwhile, somewhere with high impact research but nearly zero in reserves would presumably be more deserving?

Occasioanlly one of these people will find some one-off bit of brilliance that lifts an entire class of people out of poverty, but that ticket has an expiration date tied to the 19th century. Eventually those free spaces will run out. They're already starting to in the western world.

I'm sorry but I genuinely don't understand what you're saying here. What will expire? Which "free spaces" are running out where?

Not OP but the college entrance scandal is a great example. With the super wealthy taking up all the philanthropic entrance positions the "just" wealthy set had to resort to cheating and rorts to ease little Johnny Blueblood's way into society.

There is only so much room at the top.

What we absolutely don’t need, is autocrats dictating what society needs.

Luckily we already have this cool innovation called a market economy. It’s not perfectly efficient (especially in the short term), but pretty damn efficient.

By throwing off price signals, the market allows us to allocate efforts to things society wants more of. Unfortunately, contrary to the wishes of the King, it turns out society wants more tech companies.

But sometimes we do indeed over-allocate resources to tech companies! Luckily we have the hedge funds incentivized to make profit by arbitraging those prices back to reality (As we’ve just witnessed in tech). I guess we also need more hedge funds!

Market economy got us into the situation where the most brilliant minds in the world are researching best ways to make internet advertisements as addictive as they can be.

Very cool innovation, indeed. Ever read The Space Merchants?

They're doing a great job, ads are so addictive I've even turned off my Ad blocker so I can get more of them! Won't someone save me!

Ads would always exist, but think about how many great (even lifesaving) solutions we're missing out on because market decided they aren't worthy of pursuit.

"Nobody is addicted to ads" is true if you think only about the pop-ups and couple-second videos as "ads" - but the concept of advertisements is much wider than that. Some adverisements may not even be presented as such - they may be presented as "useful content", but which is chosen above other such useful content by the virtue of being paid for to the advertising company.

I recently turned off tracking, and suddenly started getting served ads for 'green cremation'. I guess statistically few people are interested in that, but conversions are lucrative, although the 99% of users who don't want to see it probably get mildly annoyed.

Liquidity and price discovery are useful things. Nobody would pay them otherwise.

Is there any other evidence of their usefulness beyond "people pay for it"?

"People pay for [that]" because it's a genuinely useful property of an investment vehicle.

We don't really though. There are companies, and individuals, with enough wealth and influence to compete with entire markets. A well-funded startup can undermine whole industries by spending VC money to run at a loss long enough that the rest of the market fails (Uber, AirBNB) or they can become so massive that there's absolutely no possibility of competing (Amazon). People can start private companies that do things only governments have done before (SpaceX, Palantir). These businesses are not influenced by pricing, because they're either too well funded to care, or too influential for others to get a foot in the door.

Free market economics is a beautiful idea, but every big business (and some small businesses) do all they can to subvert the market and hold a monopoly on something. Heck, Peter Thiel literally wrote a book about how to do exactly that - Zero To One.

Scale has no value unless it offers something to your customer base. What you're ignoring is that Uber, Amazon et al are so huge and dominant because customers flock to them. I can summon a taxi to my location in most cities in the world with a single app. I can have pretty much any item delivered to my door within one or two days. These were unfathomable 10-15 years ago.

Amazon has huge amounts of competition, as does Uber. I have absolutely no idea where you get this idea they are not influenced by pricing. Uber hasn't made any money in its entire existence. That is not characteristic of a monopoly.

Whether or not a functioning market economy could ever exist in reality if of course another question.

Anyway, the promise of a market economy is that it selects the "best" by competition. The fact that companies like Uber survive for decades while making losses and destroying potential competitors shows that this promise of the market economy does not stand in reality.

It's not exactly news that the market throws off price signals, the question is whether those signals are the correct signals.

After all, the market also decided it wanted opioids, slaves, and a betting shop on every high street in the UK. Are we wrong to question whether Mr Market is right?

Donations to Harvard are exposed to extremely diminished marginal utility at this point.

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 managers seldom care. (Especially outside of tech.))

So donating money to further educational institutions is bad for society. It has a negative impact.

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 effect of a worse undergrad education as researchers view teaching as a side gig but ultimately necessary to fund the university and it's research ventures

How can I become high energy physicist on YouTube ?

Individuals benefit from getting more education, but only in the sense of getting ahead in a signalling.

Perhaps an analogy helps: an individual tree benefits from growing taller than its neighbours, but the 'society' of trees scarcely gains any net benefit from that arms race.

Research is an entirely different topic that I didn't want to broach here.

For the sake of argument, let's accept that research is good for society. But we could get plenty of research without having to cross-subsidize it via education spending.

At a university level, I can't say I have studied every course or "type" of education, but it would be really surprising to me if there were any that gave nothing at all to their students

So not educating people would benefit them? I'd say it just makes them more vulnerable - looking at humanity's history.

Snort, no it most definitely is not funding education. Those giant ivey funds now exist solely to enrich the admin class (uni pres, etc), the fund managers, and the like. These have evolved into tax exempt instruments of financial engineering.