| While the person doing the napkin math didn't account for inflation, they were also wildly conservative in terms of how much of a return endowments can get from their investments, mostly just referencing the 4% rule that's useful for retiring individuals with very low risk tolerance. They estimated that free tuition for all students would cost 3% per year, but the S&P 500 has returned over 10% yearly over the last 100 years, 7% adjusted for inflation. [1] This math also assumes that the school never receives another donation ever again, which is quite unlikely. It should also be obvious that my point isn't that schools should literally run entirely on their endowment. My point is: giving money to a school like Harvard or Stanford isn't really an act of charity at this point, because they are juggernaut institutions that are too big to fail. They don't need to be raking in licensing fees from images and quotes from people who have been dead for decades. It's also interesting that, in your last sentence, you are implying that HN viewers don't know anything about running a business, but last I checked we were talking about universities. There's a little bit of irony here: my whole argument revolves around the fact that these supposedly "non-profit" educational institutions are acting very much like businesses in ways probably shouldn't be. In my view, images and text for deceased historical figures like Albert Einstein and Martin Luther King, Jr. should be part of the public domain much sooner than copyright law currently allows so that we can all enjoy and learn from their legacy freely without capitalist incentives. I think Reddit is a better place to complain about fake Internet points. I highly recommend it! [1] https://www.officialdata.org/us/stocks/s-p-500/1926 |
It is not about internet points, but the fact that how anti-capitalists the intellectual elites have become despite massively benefiting from it and the single biggest factor that has driven down poverty on a global scale.
No one read the article. It was beautiful well-written. Instead HN, like reddit went all pitch-fork "Hurr Durr, Bad Capitalists"