"....Today's universities have an insatiable appetite for cash, and thereby have to cater, in dozens of ways, to those who can provide it. Quite a few, including my own alma mater Harvard, have turned their endowments into hedge funds and thus experienced both the pre-2007 boom and the disastrous 2008 crash. (To be fair, Harvard's endowment just reported a flat year, indicating that its new manager, Janet Mendillo, has in fact adopted much more conservative strategies.) Dr. Hubbard's career is another example of how they function as one side of a triangle that also includes the financial services sector and government...." David Kaiser
I would add that, re our higher educational system, we have systematically given away what Randall Collins calls cultural capital to underdeveloped countries whose goal is to pull abreast and then overtake us.
Our laissez faire higher educational system, though an enormous market capitalist bubble for us, has frankly been of less benefit to Americans than to foreigners in recent decades.
In this sense it has paralleled our market capitalist corporate commercial and industrial sectors closely,
and, once again, according to analogous principles as Collins has pointed out.
The internet has facilitated this trend, a technology which, once again, we also pioneered, then offered to them as well.
Never, in the history of human conflict,
has so much been given away,
by so few,
to so many,
for so little,
so rapidly. Paraphrasing Churchill.
I should point out, parenthetically, that my inferences from some of Collins' views would not be shared by him, based on some of his views, eg that 'we are all one, under the skin', things like that.....
although this seems to me inconsistent with his theory of change as based on conflict, it is what it is apparently, for him.
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