Great question! Mostly it goes toward maintaining the campus and paying the admin folks. PIs are paid to teach, basically, and are expected to pull in the money to support their own research (and maintain their facilities and pay the admin folks).
This is a general theme in the last decade. There is a lot of money, but it is more and more ending up in the pockets of the extremely wealthy.
I'm really no communist, but we've reached a point where the system starts to crumble because of it.
It also can't be in the interest of the billionaires. They also want to live in a safe country and use working public infrastructure (roads, airports, air traffic control). They even need a functioning academic ecosystem if they want their children to receive a real education, not just access to a few famous professors they can buy.
I am looking at your link and thinking I took crazy pills.
The graph shows just under 23% in 1989, going up past 27% by 1996, then dipping a few years later only to go up to 29% a bit before 2008, then another dip and rise to almost 32% today.
Am I misreading the graph? If not, the percentage of wealth owned by the 1% is on track to have increased 50% over ~40 years. (23% --> 34.5%)
I don't see why a shift from 23% to 34% should produce a qualitatively different result.
The annual US federal budget is around $7 trillion. The remaining Gates fortune is around $100B. So the feds are chewing through about 70 Gates fortunes per year. And that doesn't even account for state and local spending.
The idea that the system is crumbling because all the money is ending up in the pockets of billionaires does not pass the sniff test.
You’ve got some copium in there. Why wouldn’t billionaires want a few famous professors they can buy to teach their children the same way Alexander the Great was taught by Aristotle.
You don’t have to share the education time for your kids with the poor and think of how exclusive and how much status is advertises.
As for everything else you said about it not being in the interest of the billionaires. Even if you are 100% correct they have enough money to pay someone else to deal with any frictions in life and not think about it.
On top of that, if you look at their behavior, there’s a lot of similarities between the wealthiest in society and how they treat money, and how addicts treat heroin. Addicts frequently engage in self destructive behavior for the next hit.
This is not true. Billionaires rely on public safety. To fly their private jets around the world they need ATC and airports. They need police, so angry people don't buy rockets and shoot their planes down.
They also want to chill at their pool, without hundreds of people outside rioting. They want to drive their sports cars somewhere.
They don't want to live their life in a zombie apocalypse shelter.
And how good will those bought professors be, if they didn't work at a good university?
> Billionaires rely on public safety. To fly their private jets around the world they need ATC and airports.
> They want to drive their sports cars somewhere.
If you weren’t aware the first car capable roads were laid by the rich to go racing around in their new technology called the “automobile”
> They also want to chill at their pool, without hundreds of people outside rioting.
We already have evidence of Zuckerberg buying up multiple houses to make a ring of privacy, or Bezos leaving his hedgerows higher than allowed around his property and just paying a fine. Or musks baby mama compound to handle his breeding fetish. For the physical security they already pay for armed guards.
> And how good will those bought professors be, if they didn't work at a good university?
Who cares how they are produced if there are millions of people around the world who could be classified as professors and they could just hire the best?
To be clear I’m not saying these viewpoints are viable, but they fit the behaviors we are seeing from the ultra wealthy and I already said, addicts don’t always act rationally.
Why wouldn't it be in the elite's interests? You're acting like we don't have an entire written history of elites throughout time immortal making terrible decisions that ended up killing 100s of millions of people from things like colonialism or slave trade or selling weapons of death.
There is no reason for billionaires to play nice with the public because they will never be held accountable under the current system.
You have to stop relying on their nonexistent "better angels" and actually start resisting and fighting back. Every single right or benefit that workers have gained was because they died fighting for it.
We have to continue this fight going forward because we're finding out that no one will save us except ourselves.
Perhaps you could clarify your view. Here is my understanding:
* The reason MIT has such a big endowment is because wealthy elites gave MIT money.
* The reason MIT is short on federal funds is because poorly educated voters (working-class) put their man in office.
Since you reflexively believe elites are the big bad, you should be happy with the new tax on big endowments like that of MIT. Soak the rich. Perhaps the endowment tax should go even higher. Power to the people.
I agree with you to some point. I just wouldn't frame it in a Marxist way, working class vs. everyone else. It concerns nearly everyone, not just the working class. Limiting it to the working class, excludes many influential people who are more wealthy, far away from being billionaires, but still suffer from the current developments.
We've seen such cycles before. Elites getting too wealthy and influential, until they are stopped. Long ago it was feudalism. But even early capitalism had such an example with the Gilded Age in the US. After WW2 it probably reached the state of being mostly reversed, only to start redeveloping. Funnily enough the Gilded Age was ended by Republicans.
Much of that overhead is not going to admin salaries (although, as stated elsewhere in the discussion money is fungible) but covers things like the cost of buildings, labs, maintenance, etc.
I had no idea the on-going costs of physical things did not decrease over time, what an interesting thing to know. Here I thought that after you build the building and paid off the building, then for funsies also bought all the land surrounding the building, that at some point it would drastically cheaper to maintain it; but what you're saying makes so much sense!