It sounds like they're running it like a business.
This eventually leads to competitors taking over and those business failing, which usually results in people losing their jobs.
When governments get equally incapable, and competitors take over, it tends to be a lot more violent.
You can argue that it's overall bad for the economy, but I think you're missing the arguement.
The escalation in costs have come from: - Incentives around US News College rankings (and the amenities that drive the rankings) - Administrative (non-teaching, non-research) bloat
Research is definitely in need of reform though, but not sure these outcomes are actually causal or even corrilated.
Hey, good point. We should really bring back that 90% top tax bracket rate to get the government back to being financially solvent again.
It's a spending problem. You're anchoring on a talking point with out actually running numbers.
Don't believe me, run the numbers yourself.
From what I can see, taxation as GDP percentage was never really under 10% since 1950, while big cuts to the top tax rate happened in the 60s and 80s (and the federal budget was continuously in the red since mid 70s basically, with one brief exception before 2000).
Just to add some empiricism to the conversation
Fiscal Year Tariffs/Customs Individual Income Corporate Income Top Marginal Rate Receipts (% GDP)
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
1928 14.0% (approx) DNF DNF 25.0% DNF
1935 8.4% 14.6% 14.7% 63.0% 5.1%
1940 6.1% 13.6% 18.3% 81.1% 6.7%
1944 0.9% 45.0% 33.9% 94.0% 20.5%
1952 1.2% (approx) 42.2% 32.1% 92.0% 19.0%
1960 1.3% (approx) 42.0% 23.0% 91.0% 17.8%
1970 1.1% (approx) 46.0% 18.0% 71.8% 17.9%
1980 0.8% (approx) 47.0% 12.0% 70.0% 18.9%
1990 1.3% (approx) 45.0% 9.0% 28.0% 17.8%
2000 1.1% (approx) 49.0% 11.0% 39.6% 20.0%
2010 1.2% (approx) 41.0% 9.0% 35.0% 14.6%
2015 1.3% (approx) 47.0% 10.0% 39.6% 17.6%
2019 2.0% (approx) 50.0% 7.0% 37.0% 16.3%
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
DNF=Did not find
- Tariffs fell from ≈14% of receipts in 1928 to <1% by WWII -> income taxes replaced trade duties.
- Individual income taxes overtook all other sources after 1943
- Corporate shares peaked during war mobilization (~⅓ of revenue in 1944–52).
- Top marginal tax rate was surprisingly not too corrilated to government revenue.
(REALLY wish HN did basic markdown formatting)
Yes. Which is interesting, but also makes sense if you assume that a frequent goal is to shift the tax allocation between wealth classes (adjustments to top rate would be somewhat compensated by other changes).
I think it is always too easy to find arguments for almost any position in data like this, because the overall picture changes dramatically over just a few decades; wealth/income percentiles become qualitatively different as GDP grows ("workers class" pre WW2 is quite different from the same income percentile now) and the data is noisy too, so if you squint you can interpret almost anything in there.
In a perfect world, we would have twenty identical Americas with fixed tax policies, and be able to compare their development over decades; what we have is instead a bunch of different nations radically changing their behavior basically every time a different government comes into power, and many conclusions are inevitably just educated guesswork.
I do think, however, that empiricism is a better framework for grounding outcomes in reality than pure ideology. Pure ideology (either way) is usually just confirms biases by cherry picking data.
If only that fairytale were true. In the real world bloated inefficient companies bribe government, install themselves into government agencies directly (regulatory capture), and hire lobbyists to write laws which protect them from pesky upstarts through unchecked anti-competitive practices and anti-consumer regulation allowing them to stay wealthy and in power forever while killing off innovation and progress.
Comments like this always seem to lead to calls to give the government greater power to rein in those companies.
I'm not claiming these abuses don't exist. But there's no reason not to also look at them as the government getting a lot better at taking advantage of companies, to protect their offices. If you look at it in this context, it should be clear that increasing regulatory authority is far from a solution: it's actually counter-productive, creating tools to facilitate ever-greater abuses.
IBM's stock price is 10 times what it was in 1991. What the hell have they even done in that time?
They don't have to be whatever you think is "industry leading in computing", because apparently just once being worth something was enough to enrich an entire generation of management while the rest of us struggle.
>Ford
Despite decades of failure that led to their struggles in 2008 and an increase in energy costs, they didn't die, and despite then selling several lines of cars that had serious defects that should no longer happen, they abandoned selling anything other than overpriced trucks and are STILL doing just fine.
>Sears
Sears was murdered to enrich a few already wealthy people. At no point did it do worse business.
Do you know which companies you didn't even mention that do not support your claim? All the gigantic conglomerates that own you.
From Disney owning a giant chunk of all media and setting national IP policy, to Sysco being one of the only food service companies because they ate all the other ones so now every restaurant is stuck selling the same food as most prisons, to Nestle owning most of the grocery store so they can sell you water that they pumped out of your aquifer for crazy rates while complaining they couldn't be profitable without slave labor, to Dupont poisoning the entire earth, to fossil fuel companies that set national energy policy, to most farming in the US being beholden to a single legal entity, to the vast majority of "Brands" in the US just being a label change of a product they did not design.
You seem to be under this absurd notion that as long as the brand name on a couple consumer items changes occasionally (due to the kinds of technological innovations that we will never see again and cannot be predicted or relied upon), everything is fine?
It's important to note that "eventually" usually takes so long that it might as well be forever.
The problem is some people prefer an academic lifestyle in exchange for doing performative research.
Yes there are other actors eg politicians demanding performative productivity, but mostly it’s the inmates running the asylum.
Academia is one failed western institution amongst many, and those failures are ultimately directed by the actions of the individuals that comprise those institutions.
It is like saying, if everyone stops subscribing to OnlyFans or liking spicy pics on Instagram, it will go away.
There will always be sycophants willing to do "performative research" or ... other things.
Academia is beyond broken.
The bad drove out the good.
Right, and the prisoner's "dilemma" isn't a real thing; everyone knows it's their own fault for not just all picking the decision that gives them all the best outcome. Every individual within a network effect is obviously responsible for the outcomes the entire system produces.
If you're willing to blame someone for not acting against their own individual interest, doesn't it make more sense for it to be the people who are going out of their way to reward others for acting in that way?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
Evolution creates a situation that encourages all sorts of terrible actions, and the vast majority of people choose to control their animal instincts.
Additionally: the people who encourage the performative research are the people who control grant review. And those people are the same people as the performative researchers.
A bunch of people figured they could make a career doing bs performative research and corrupted the whole system to serve them.
Arguably America is the pinnacle of this right now, where (many) politicians and (many) business leaders now feel justified do whatever's legal just to score points. I would argue this type of thinking was birthed in the UK though under Thatcher who as a first step removed the general trust in (civil servants in her case) your fellow human beings. Blair then came up to replace that trust with KPIs.
We need to get back to a world where we trust people to do the right thing - without measuring their success in short-term KPIs.
The potentially easier way at least to get a lay of the land is to follow pubmed (https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/) for the topic you are interested in, if you then look into those papers you will find funding statements as well as the place the research was conducted and use both to build up a picture of the origins of research in a field.
Afraid I don't know of an easier way not a generic one anyway. Sometimes you just have to follow the right person on twitter who announces trials or studies or be at the right conference. Start with pubmed and the output papers and that will get you started. Then also have a search on the NIH and that might lead you to some links to groups and institutions they fund.
https://clinicaltrials.gov/search?aggFilters=phase:3,status:...
Says nothing about endemic reproducibility crisis of the social sciences.
Since student loans have been basically guaranteed (bankruptcies can’t erase student loan obligations, in an attempt to push rates lower) and tuition steeply rose, academic institutions’ ratio of administrators to students has skyrocketed to a bureaucratic mess, leading to a flywheel of higher education costs and incentivizing research for money’s sake over impact to the field.
Real impact would be reproducing notoriously iffy studies, but that doesn’t bring in the dollars.
There is a lot of hyping of results in medicine papers in general but its not really their fault. The entire academic world is being forced to publish or die as governments look to measure results from the science they instead get what is measured and everyone has to embellish the importance of what they found and always find positive results.