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by jltsiren 35 days ago
Money is not fungible when you are a large organization. Many things that should be possible in principle are impossible in practice due to rules, politics, and institutional inertia.

MIT's endowment is ~80% earmarked to whatever purposes the donors considered important. The remaining ~20% is unrestricted, but unrestricted does not mean unallocated. Everything has already been allocated to some purpose, at least implictly. If you want to allocate more money towards something, you need to take that money from somewhere else. And then you get politics.
1 comments
wallst07 35 days ago
>practice due to rules, politics, and institutional inertia.

Isn't that the responsibility of the dean to fix? I think a lot of us have no idea how this actually works, but do understand the difference between impossible and hard. This seems more like it's on the hard side than impossible.

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jltsiren 34 days ago
A dean is a mid-level manager in an organization, where effective power is widely diffused.

Many things are possible in the same sense as rewriting the US constitution. The mechanism for it exists, but using it in practice would require widespread agreement on the specifics. When there are many people making independent decisions, it's best to see the situation in statistical terms. Outcomes that are too many standard deviations away from the expected are effectively impossible.

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