I would advise wealthy people not to create permanent foundations, but instead dispose of your wealth at your death or through a limited-life foundation.
A peculiarly toxic American institutional combination is:
(1) an abundance of nonprofits grifting off of large-donor and government funding
(2) laws, often environmental, that give those groups standing to sue to force policy changes.
NEPA and CEQA are the poster children here, but the recent Yglesias column about how the ESA was used by a nonprofit to make forest management harder in the so called "Cottonwood decision" is another good example.
Trying to pass the Chesterton fence test here: as best I can tell, this regime grew up because the prevailing belief in the 60s-70s was that the government was hopelessly captured by greedy industrial interests, which was a reasonable belief given the prior 20-30 years of policy, and that nonprofits represented the civic virtue of ordinary people standing up against them. But in practice it seems that all it does is let a few cranks with an axe to grind set up as a nonprofit and convince a gullible judge to let them throw some sand in the gears. And that belief in nonprofits as repositories of civic virtue encourages large donations to the grifters as, literally, a form of virtue signaling.
Nick Kristof's NYT column today asking why West Coast state and city governance is so poor is also relevant here. He tentatively pins the blame on one-party dominance, which is surely a factor, but I think probably underplays the role of nonprofit -driven corruption and obstruction which seems worse here than in the East.
"Trying to pass the Chesterton fence test here: as best I can tell, this regime grew up because the prevailing belief in the 60s-70s was that the government was hopelessly captured by greedy industrial interests, which was a reasonable belief given the prior 20-30 years of policy, and that nonprofits represented the civic virtue of ordinary people standing up against them."
When a 'regime' like this arises it will always provide a rationalization, and "exceptional circumstances" justification, but as in this case, that is most often just a cover story for what is really going on.
What is really going on is that when a political agenda hits a political, constitutional, legal, or procedural roadblock, determined activists don't just throw up their hands and give up, or even just live to fight another day, but shift tactics to blow up the roadblock, by doing a public relations campaign intended to undermine its perceived legitimacy among members of the relevant audience, or simply circumventing it altogether, by hook or by crook. A roadblock that stands in the way of good progress and/or protects a bad status quo is per se a bad roadblock that, at the very least, should have a small hole cut through it for this particular case.
Since the New Deal the easiest circumvention of constitutional procedure has always been to find a way to get a pretextual case in front of an allied judge and get him him to overrule democracy via diktat or approve a non-adversarial "settlement" to the same end.
Nonprofit activist groups are the paragovernmental equivalent of paramilitaries, the system adjusting itself contrary to the wishes of the voters by pretending to be forced to do it from entities outside the system.
Also your annual reminder that that “abundance” of enviro-oriented non-profits receive less than 2% of charitable giving in the US; that figure includes zoos and animal shelters (!) so it’s much smaller still.
Hard to know where to start, but the only reason we have anything left of the natural world in America is because of the people you despise. Not that this registers - I’ve been on the internet long enough to realize that, not meaning to misattribute to anyone an interest in nature or in externalities generally.
Boaz: "I would love to see a fiscally conservative, socially liberal centrist party. I do believe there are millions of voters who think that way, maybe a plurality of voters who think that way."
Only a tiny fraction of voters think that way (see graph):
Right. I don't want to say "libertarians believe / think ... " because there is a huge amount of variance. Still, there are a lot of ideas that are supported by a lot of libertarians that could all be fairly characterized as very extreme in terms of there being only a tiny percent of the population which shares those policy preferences, and an even tinier percent which shares them for the same reason and not in the "strange bedfellows" sense of a coincidence based in other reasons which if pursued further would only serve to undermine other libertarian goals.
Over the last two generations there seems to have been some kind of mood / attitude / rhetorical shift in libertarian commentary. It was once characterized by an awareness, embrace, and self-identification as either members of a trailblazing vanguard on the one hand (Bryan Caplan is a good contemporary example) or a shrinking remnant nobly fighting a rearguard action on the other.
For many libertarian public intellectuals, this attitude has gradually shifted to one which mistakes the writer's own sense of what is "longstanding, respectable, and reasonable in my intellectual social scene" for elements of a "silent majority mainstream popular centrist consensus". Which isn't remotely true. It's no mystery why anyone who makes this mistake is inevitably going to say a lot of really stupid things about American politics.
I don't know how people were plotted and maybe the scale is off but it suggests almost nobody is more than slightly fiscally conservative. Then again, how fiscally conservative need one be to think federal deficit spending has gone from bad to worse? As for socially liberal, I suspect the few in the middle (or the many if the graph is wrong) have very different ideas what socially liberal means.
I have concluded that the Republicans were never actually serious about limiting spending/government, but at least they used to give it lip service. There was even a hilarious period when the Democrats were giving it lip service. No more.
It is all a matter of framing. The scale goes from 1 to 0 to -1. Is 0 the current budget or something less than that? Is -1 a hypothetical zero budget or some larger amount ? If more than zero, how much more?
Lots of people have something they want to cut, even many liberals. Plenty of them want to cut defense spending.
All this leaves the question of how we define slightly vs something more severe.
Neither do I think that there is "a plurality of voters who think that way", nor even that there is a plurality of voters that think.
People think what they are told to think.
And at least at the moment, to be "socially liberal" means liberally - and willingly - paying for the social consequences of one's liberal social attitudes toward others, and nothing short of that.
My companion here offers that it is at least probable that a majority of Americans are more conservative than the Democratic party and less conservative than the GOP (or one might more aptly say *less* zealously whatever the GOP is, it not being conservative in any real sense, and tending lately toward wild demagoguery and reality TV-type antics).
However, this is of no matter because to ignore the fact that US politics is polarized would be to ignore the last 200 years of history. And the fiscally unsound result, in pursuit of rewarding ever more special interests, is distributed among umpteen legislators, so there can never be any accountability.
Which is why those "wonks" as they used to call them, who liked accountancy - your Phil Gramm or whoever - never get very far in this system.
The only person who could be accountable for a gazillion dollar debt is a monarch.
Your Ford Foundation stands in the way of that, so maybe you should be glad it exists.
We'd need to do and say all sorts of unpopular things.
We'd have to be rid of all these federal judges.
And get rid of both political parties, that both utterly pander to illegal immigration.
And we'd need to get rid of all these blogs, he concludes cheerfully. And we need more parkland.
I am slightly skeptical about that graph, only because I don't trust the survey process. I frequently find that people affiliate or give themselves numbers on a line in one way and address specific, concrete issues in a very different way. For example, I have a friend who voted Democrat most of his life, but as he got older started veering more libertarian. Not just because he was friends with me, but partly because of the recognition that leftist policies didn't really help people like they were supposed to, and that generally he didn't want to tell people what to do. In other words, he was really a bleeding heart libertarian type.
In general, I find lots of people rather follow that model: they want government to help people some (and actually do it), and otherwise they don't care what people do so long as they are not hurting others, while at the same time they don't like all the debt to the extent they are aware of it (and they generally have no idea the massive amount of crap governments do).
Is that common outside of the sorts of people I run into a lot? I don't know. I suspect it might be more than that graph generally suggests, however, because I note that nearly all political propaganda focuses on government protecting group X from scary group Y that wants to hurt them, helping people in general, and totally ignoring all questions of tradeoffs, spending and debt, all while ignoring the 1,000's of ridiculous spending sinks. That's a little bit of proof by noticing what the liars don't want us to look at, but I think it is suggestive.
Re: Your insightful interview about not-for-profit orgs.
Colleges and universities are a puzzle. Customer fees (tuition) are a large fraction of revenues, especially at private universities. There is much competition among universities for enrollments. Given that customer fees, competition, and customer preferences play large roles in the market for enrollments, why do universities operate like indifferent bureaucracies towards matriculated students?
Maybe the key distortion is governance (tenure, politicized hiring, rent-seeking governance of curriculum), rather than not-for-profit constitution per se?
Maybe another key distortion is "the signaling model" of education as a rat-race for a credential that says "I am smart and willing to jump through hoops"?
It seems that there are three accountabilities in universities, whether public or private: (a) To faculty who have governance privileges, (b) to boards of trustees largely constituted by major donors, and (c) to customers (many of whom receive subsidies).
Presumably, public universities have a fourth accountability: To lawmakers who make appropriations (taxpayer subsidies).
Universities feature a peculiar sequence of (1) competition and consumer sovereignty in the admissions market, followed by (2) faculty governance over matriculants.
It seems that various major frictions in "the transfer market" discourage students from transferring to a different university if they are dissatisfied. In the market for selective colleges, competition for customers (matriculants) occurs almost entirely at the point of first entry to college. Do frictions in the transfer market for students facilitate rent-seeking by faculty within universities?
Fungibility of most gifts heavily dilutes accountability to donors.
Incentives across the main stakeholders are badly misaligned, but somehow constitute a resource-intensive equilibrium.
In many ways, they don't "operate like indifferent bureaucracies towards matriculated students". They provide students with fairly comfortable housing and fairly palatable food. They have substantial student affairs offices, counseling services, health services.
Where they do, it's partly inherent to the business. Students are by definition uneducated and so cannot judge how good a job the school is doing when it comes to education.
Many would say that a good deal of what selective schools are selling is "prestige". This requires the student to simply accept that what the school is doing is good. After all, they are prestigious, as indicated by how hard they are to get in. Even a non-selective school is selling the prestige of "being a college graduate".
Student Affairs offices engage mainly in social control and provide little that students value. The fact that a very large fraction of students, especially young women, avail themselves of counseling services on campus is a clear indicator of unhappiness and dissatisfaction. The uneducated students know enough to see thought "the gen ed hustle" of curricular requirements designed as employment programs for faculty.
Prestige is not inscrutable, especially once students find their sea legs on campus.
Students quickly learn that they cannot gain access to courses they want or need in a timely manner; and that many of the too numerous Majors are thinly staffed; and that they cannot fight city hall (admin); and that the rhetoric of "transformative experience" violates truth in advertising; and that collective action in pursuit of good governance is elusive, even though they inhabit a total institution.
I think that students who stick it out are of two minds. On the one hand, they think, "This is bullsh*t." On the other, they know that the school has prestige and they want to get some of that prestige for themselves. Deep down (or maybe not so deep) they feel the school must be doing something right, must know something they don't, so they should go along.
"Customer fees (tuition) are a large fraction of revenues, especially at private universities. “
I’d have to see the numbers to believe that - especially for the ivies. They are also not competing for the best students anymore - only the best ‘oppressed' students, perhaps. And it’s always free taxpayer money which causes the largest incentive distortions in these organizations.
Dr. Kling concludes, "I think that when they are funded by grass-roots contributions, non-profits are not too bad. Funded by large donors and you start to have problems. Non-profits that sponge off the government are the worst."
I think he and I are in solid agreement on that last, but I'd differ on the first two. Non-profits funded by many small contributions expend a lot of their resources on fund-raising rather than on their purported object. For their purposes, it's worth it to spend a dollar on fund-raising if it brings in $1.01 in new contributions. Big-donor nonprofits, especially when they've got a single billionaire funder, can spend all their money on their object: I doubt that, say, the Gates Foundation spends much of its budget sending Bill and Melinda Gates weekly appeals for more cash.
Grass-roots-funded nonprofits also have to pick their objects for maximum appeal to their contributor base. A dollar spent on eradicating Guinea worm probably relieves considerably more human suffering than a dollar spent sending little Susie, who's got terminal cancer, to Disneyland. But the American public is likely to respond better to photos of little Susie looking sad but hopeful than to photos of worms emerging from African children's bodies.
The major problem that I see with billionaire-funded nonprofits is that they'll survive long after their founders. Bill and Melinda Gates are personally interested in their causes, and will take steps to ensure that those causes are efficiently addressed. However, after they've been summoned to Abraham's bosom, their foundation will go on under a board of directors, who're less likely to share the Gates' priorities, and who'll leave things largely up to administrators with their own agendas to pursue. This, I suspect, is what's happened with the Ford Foundation.
I like the idea of fiscally conservative, socially liberal but what does it mean? Is there still a plurality if we account for diverging views within that group?
Surely it includes freedom of speech and religion. Sexual freedom.
I suspect pretty much everyone in that category wants a smaller federal govt. Do they want state and local to also shrink or to take over some of the federal spending? What about abortion? Gun control? Public schools? What about helping the poor? Should govt do less or no spending on the last two? What about defense spending? The government shouldn't be allowed to discriminate, and maybe large companies, however that might be defined, but what about individuals? How many want less government policy and regulation and how many want more in the name of enforcing some kind of equality?
I mostly know what a big government social liberal looks like. I'm not sure anyone really knows what a fiscally conservative social liberal is.
I guess than depends on how extreme the govt budget cuts have to be to qualify as fiscally conservative. From our current starting point, most people want it smaller and a healthy fraction of those could find some places they'd actually cut spending.
I'd like to see a fiscally conservative party, too, but I do not mean by this one that transfers less. I mean by fiscally conservative (rule of thumb) that expenditures meet the NPV => zero (a pure transfer means zero) and taxes to the maximally extent possible be levied on consumption, not income. Cashed out this to me means "horizontal" transfers (well to ill, employed to unemployed, non aged to aged, those not rearing children to those that are, etc.) are financed with a VAT. "Vernicle" transfers would be with EITC and a progressive consumption tax, an "income" tax that deducts non-consumption uses of income. This would, I think, mean very small deficits, basically with the state borrowing to finance high-return projects that cannot easily be carried out by private investment.
I acknowledge there can be some tradeoffs, but being gung ho for growth and using markets to guide production, investment, and consumption (including Pigou taxes/subsidies for externalities) does not mean being against "redistribution."
Schrager: The weak link of Neoliberalism was that it was (or least least its rhetoric was) captured by those who were willing to cut taxes (and more on the rich) even w/o cutting expenditure, leading to deficits. That led to trade deficits and slower growth. Also, it talked about DE regulation rather than smart regulation, so neither happened.
I think what Boaz is grasping at is a politics where compromise doesn't result in almost an automatic loss to demagogues in primaries. I don't think that's possible with the current configuration in the US. It would need some combination of ranked choice voting, open primaries and much less gerrymandering. Perhaps term limits too. I kinda like George Will's idea of barring Senators from running for president.
Boaz was just wrong- there isn't a majority of the voter base that is fiscally conservative. In my lifetime there was exactly one instance where a party in power in Congress attempted to fiscally restrain the federal government and that ended the day the War on Terror started.
I am not so sure. I think voters are very ignorant about government spending, and government activity in general, and unfortunately that combines with a strong tendency towards "If my team is doing it, it is good" thinking. The result is they don't think really hard about what is being done and what that all costs, and rather just run with "well, my guys are probably doing the right thing."
I suspect that if you gave most people a detailed federal government budget they would pretty happily find 10-20% in spending reductions in short order. Now, whether a large group of people could agree on what those reductions should be is another question, absolutely. Still, many programs would not stand up to scrutiny among large swaths of the population. There are, for instance, well over 80 needs based assistance programs at the federal level across various agencies (no one knows how many exactly). I think a large majority of the population would agree to a proposal to consolidate those to at least save on administration cost.
Henry Ford may well be rolling over in his grave, but he did not create the Ford Foundation. That was his son Edsel. (https://www.fordfoundation.org/about/about-ford/our-origins).
I would advise wealthy people not to create permanent foundations, but instead dispose of your wealth at your death or through a limited-life foundation.
A peculiarly toxic American institutional combination is:
(1) an abundance of nonprofits grifting off of large-donor and government funding
(2) laws, often environmental, that give those groups standing to sue to force policy changes.
NEPA and CEQA are the poster children here, but the recent Yglesias column about how the ESA was used by a nonprofit to make forest management harder in the so called "Cottonwood decision" is another good example.
Trying to pass the Chesterton fence test here: as best I can tell, this regime grew up because the prevailing belief in the 60s-70s was that the government was hopelessly captured by greedy industrial interests, which was a reasonable belief given the prior 20-30 years of policy, and that nonprofits represented the civic virtue of ordinary people standing up against them. But in practice it seems that all it does is let a few cranks with an axe to grind set up as a nonprofit and convince a gullible judge to let them throw some sand in the gears. And that belief in nonprofits as repositories of civic virtue encourages large donations to the grifters as, literally, a form of virtue signaling.
Nick Kristof's NYT column today asking why West Coast state and city governance is so poor is also relevant here. He tentatively pins the blame on one-party dominance, which is surely a factor, but I think probably underplays the role of nonprofit -driven corruption and obstruction which seems worse here than in the East.
"Trying to pass the Chesterton fence test here: as best I can tell, this regime grew up because the prevailing belief in the 60s-70s was that the government was hopelessly captured by greedy industrial interests, which was a reasonable belief given the prior 20-30 years of policy, and that nonprofits represented the civic virtue of ordinary people standing up against them."
When a 'regime' like this arises it will always provide a rationalization, and "exceptional circumstances" justification, but as in this case, that is most often just a cover story for what is really going on.
What is really going on is that when a political agenda hits a political, constitutional, legal, or procedural roadblock, determined activists don't just throw up their hands and give up, or even just live to fight another day, but shift tactics to blow up the roadblock, by doing a public relations campaign intended to undermine its perceived legitimacy among members of the relevant audience, or simply circumventing it altogether, by hook or by crook. A roadblock that stands in the way of good progress and/or protects a bad status quo is per se a bad roadblock that, at the very least, should have a small hole cut through it for this particular case.
Since the New Deal the easiest circumvention of constitutional procedure has always been to find a way to get a pretextual case in front of an allied judge and get him him to overrule democracy via diktat or approve a non-adversarial "settlement" to the same end.
Nonprofit activist groups are the paragovernmental equivalent of paramilitaries, the system adjusting itself contrary to the wishes of the voters by pretending to be forced to do it from entities outside the system.
Also your annual reminder that that “abundance” of enviro-oriented non-profits receive less than 2% of charitable giving in the US; that figure includes zoos and animal shelters (!) so it’s much smaller still.
Hard to know where to start, but the only reason we have anything left of the natural world in America is because of the people you despise. Not that this registers - I’ve been on the internet long enough to realize that, not meaning to misattribute to anyone an interest in nature or in externalities generally.
Boaz: "I would love to see a fiscally conservative, socially liberal centrist party. I do believe there are millions of voters who think that way, maybe a plurality of voters who think that way."
Only a tiny fraction of voters think that way (see graph):
https://x.com/RyanTAnd/status/895651901814915073
Right. I don't want to say "libertarians believe / think ... " because there is a huge amount of variance. Still, there are a lot of ideas that are supported by a lot of libertarians that could all be fairly characterized as very extreme in terms of there being only a tiny percent of the population which shares those policy preferences, and an even tinier percent which shares them for the same reason and not in the "strange bedfellows" sense of a coincidence based in other reasons which if pursued further would only serve to undermine other libertarian goals.
Over the last two generations there seems to have been some kind of mood / attitude / rhetorical shift in libertarian commentary. It was once characterized by an awareness, embrace, and self-identification as either members of a trailblazing vanguard on the one hand (Bryan Caplan is a good contemporary example) or a shrinking remnant nobly fighting a rearguard action on the other.
For many libertarian public intellectuals, this attitude has gradually shifted to one which mistakes the writer's own sense of what is "longstanding, respectable, and reasonable in my intellectual social scene" for elements of a "silent majority mainstream popular centrist consensus". Which isn't remotely true. It's no mystery why anyone who makes this mistake is inevitably going to say a lot of really stupid things about American politics.
I don't know how people were plotted and maybe the scale is off but it suggests almost nobody is more than slightly fiscally conservative. Then again, how fiscally conservative need one be to think federal deficit spending has gone from bad to worse? As for socially liberal, I suspect the few in the middle (or the many if the graph is wrong) have very different ideas what socially liberal means.
"I don't know how people were plotted and maybe the scale is off but it suggests almost nobody is more than slightly fiscally conservative."
Do you really doubt that? There doesn't seem to be any political constituency for fiscal restraint any more. It just isn't even on the agenda. Sigh.
I have concluded that the Republicans were never actually serious about limiting spending/government, but at least they used to give it lip service. There was even a hilarious period when the Democrats were giving it lip service. No more.
It is all a matter of framing. The scale goes from 1 to 0 to -1. Is 0 the current budget or something less than that? Is -1 a hypothetical zero budget or some larger amount ? If more than zero, how much more?
Lots of people have something they want to cut, even many liberals. Plenty of them want to cut defense spending.
All this leaves the question of how we define slightly vs something more severe.
Neither do I think that there is "a plurality of voters who think that way", nor even that there is a plurality of voters that think.
People think what they are told to think.
And at least at the moment, to be "socially liberal" means liberally - and willingly - paying for the social consequences of one's liberal social attitudes toward others, and nothing short of that.
My companion here offers that it is at least probable that a majority of Americans are more conservative than the Democratic party and less conservative than the GOP (or one might more aptly say *less* zealously whatever the GOP is, it not being conservative in any real sense, and tending lately toward wild demagoguery and reality TV-type antics).
However, this is of no matter because to ignore the fact that US politics is polarized would be to ignore the last 200 years of history. And the fiscally unsound result, in pursuit of rewarding ever more special interests, is distributed among umpteen legislators, so there can never be any accountability.
Which is why those "wonks" as they used to call them, who liked accountancy - your Phil Gramm or whoever - never get very far in this system.
The only person who could be accountable for a gazillion dollar debt is a monarch.
Your Ford Foundation stands in the way of that, so maybe you should be glad it exists.
We'd need to do and say all sorts of unpopular things.
We'd have to be rid of all these federal judges.
And get rid of both political parties, that both utterly pander to illegal immigration.
And we'd need to get rid of all these blogs, he concludes cheerfully. And we need more parkland.
I am slightly skeptical about that graph, only because I don't trust the survey process. I frequently find that people affiliate or give themselves numbers on a line in one way and address specific, concrete issues in a very different way. For example, I have a friend who voted Democrat most of his life, but as he got older started veering more libertarian. Not just because he was friends with me, but partly because of the recognition that leftist policies didn't really help people like they were supposed to, and that generally he didn't want to tell people what to do. In other words, he was really a bleeding heart libertarian type.
In general, I find lots of people rather follow that model: they want government to help people some (and actually do it), and otherwise they don't care what people do so long as they are not hurting others, while at the same time they don't like all the debt to the extent they are aware of it (and they generally have no idea the massive amount of crap governments do).
Is that common outside of the sorts of people I run into a lot? I don't know. I suspect it might be more than that graph generally suggests, however, because I note that nearly all political propaganda focuses on government protecting group X from scary group Y that wants to hurt them, helping people in general, and totally ignoring all questions of tradeoffs, spending and debt, all while ignoring the 1,000's of ridiculous spending sinks. That's a little bit of proof by noticing what the liars don't want us to look at, but I think it is suggestive.
Re: Your insightful interview about not-for-profit orgs.
Colleges and universities are a puzzle. Customer fees (tuition) are a large fraction of revenues, especially at private universities. There is much competition among universities for enrollments. Given that customer fees, competition, and customer preferences play large roles in the market for enrollments, why do universities operate like indifferent bureaucracies towards matriculated students?
Maybe the key distortion is governance (tenure, politicized hiring, rent-seeking governance of curriculum), rather than not-for-profit constitution per se?
Maybe another key distortion is "the signaling model" of education as a rat-race for a credential that says "I am smart and willing to jump through hoops"?
It seems that there are three accountabilities in universities, whether public or private: (a) To faculty who have governance privileges, (b) to boards of trustees largely constituted by major donors, and (c) to customers (many of whom receive subsidies).
Presumably, public universities have a fourth accountability: To lawmakers who make appropriations (taxpayer subsidies).
Universities feature a peculiar sequence of (1) competition and consumer sovereignty in the admissions market, followed by (2) faculty governance over matriculants.
It seems that various major frictions in "the transfer market" discourage students from transferring to a different university if they are dissatisfied. In the market for selective colleges, competition for customers (matriculants) occurs almost entirely at the point of first entry to college. Do frictions in the transfer market for students facilitate rent-seeking by faculty within universities?
Fungibility of most gifts heavily dilutes accountability to donors.
Incentives across the main stakeholders are badly misaligned, but somehow constitute a resource-intensive equilibrium.
In many ways, they don't "operate like indifferent bureaucracies towards matriculated students". They provide students with fairly comfortable housing and fairly palatable food. They have substantial student affairs offices, counseling services, health services.
Where they do, it's partly inherent to the business. Students are by definition uneducated and so cannot judge how good a job the school is doing when it comes to education.
Many would say that a good deal of what selective schools are selling is "prestige". This requires the student to simply accept that what the school is doing is good. After all, they are prestigious, as indicated by how hard they are to get in. Even a non-selective school is selling the prestige of "being a college graduate".
Student Affairs offices engage mainly in social control and provide little that students value. The fact that a very large fraction of students, especially young women, avail themselves of counseling services on campus is a clear indicator of unhappiness and dissatisfaction. The uneducated students know enough to see thought "the gen ed hustle" of curricular requirements designed as employment programs for faculty.
Prestige is not inscrutable, especially once students find their sea legs on campus.
Students quickly learn that they cannot gain access to courses they want or need in a timely manner; and that many of the too numerous Majors are thinly staffed; and that they cannot fight city hall (admin); and that the rhetoric of "transformative experience" violates truth in advertising; and that collective action in pursuit of good governance is elusive, even though they inhabit a total institution.
I think that students who stick it out are of two minds. On the one hand, they think, "This is bullsh*t." On the other, they know that the school has prestige and they want to get some of that prestige for themselves. Deep down (or maybe not so deep) they feel the school must be doing something right, must know something they don't, so they should go along.
"Customer fees (tuition) are a large fraction of revenues, especially at private universities. “
I’d have to see the numbers to believe that - especially for the ivies. They are also not competing for the best students anymore - only the best ‘oppressed' students, perhaps. And it’s always free taxpayer money which causes the largest incentive distortions in these organizations.
The Ivies aren't a representative sample. Tuition is the largest revenue source at most private universities.
A random example: Form 990 of Franklin & Marshall College (2021) reports that total revenues = 196M, tuition revenues = 135M:
https://projects.propublica.org/nonprofits/organizations/231352635/202301359349307140/full
Dr. Kling concludes, "I think that when they are funded by grass-roots contributions, non-profits are not too bad. Funded by large donors and you start to have problems. Non-profits that sponge off the government are the worst."
I think he and I are in solid agreement on that last, but I'd differ on the first two. Non-profits funded by many small contributions expend a lot of their resources on fund-raising rather than on their purported object. For their purposes, it's worth it to spend a dollar on fund-raising if it brings in $1.01 in new contributions. Big-donor nonprofits, especially when they've got a single billionaire funder, can spend all their money on their object: I doubt that, say, the Gates Foundation spends much of its budget sending Bill and Melinda Gates weekly appeals for more cash.
Grass-roots-funded nonprofits also have to pick their objects for maximum appeal to their contributor base. A dollar spent on eradicating Guinea worm probably relieves considerably more human suffering than a dollar spent sending little Susie, who's got terminal cancer, to Disneyland. But the American public is likely to respond better to photos of little Susie looking sad but hopeful than to photos of worms emerging from African children's bodies.
The major problem that I see with billionaire-funded nonprofits is that they'll survive long after their founders. Bill and Melinda Gates are personally interested in their causes, and will take steps to ensure that those causes are efficiently addressed. However, after they've been summoned to Abraham's bosom, their foundation will go on under a board of directors, who're less likely to share the Gates' priorities, and who'll leave things largely up to administrators with their own agendas to pursue. This, I suspect, is what's happened with the Ford Foundation.
But Scott Alexander says much of this far better then I can: https://slatestarcodex.com/2019/07/29/against-against-billionaire-philanthropy/
I like the idea of fiscally conservative, socially liberal but what does it mean? Is there still a plurality if we account for diverging views within that group?
Surely it includes freedom of speech and religion. Sexual freedom.
I suspect pretty much everyone in that category wants a smaller federal govt. Do they want state and local to also shrink or to take over some of the federal spending? What about abortion? Gun control? Public schools? What about helping the poor? Should govt do less or no spending on the last two? What about defense spending? The government shouldn't be allowed to discriminate, and maybe large companies, however that might be defined, but what about individuals? How many want less government policy and regulation and how many want more in the name of enforcing some kind of equality?
I mostly know what a big government social liberal looks like. I'm not sure anyone really knows what a fiscally conservative social liberal is.
To me a fiscally conservative conservative is the unicorn to be looked for.
I guess than depends on how extreme the govt budget cuts have to be to qualify as fiscally conservative. From our current starting point, most people want it smaller and a healthy fraction of those could find some places they'd actually cut spending.
I'd like to see a fiscally conservative party, too, but I do not mean by this one that transfers less. I mean by fiscally conservative (rule of thumb) that expenditures meet the NPV => zero (a pure transfer means zero) and taxes to the maximally extent possible be levied on consumption, not income. Cashed out this to me means "horizontal" transfers (well to ill, employed to unemployed, non aged to aged, those not rearing children to those that are, etc.) are financed with a VAT. "Vernicle" transfers would be with EITC and a progressive consumption tax, an "income" tax that deducts non-consumption uses of income. This would, I think, mean very small deficits, basically with the state borrowing to finance high-return projects that cannot easily be carried out by private investment.
I acknowledge there can be some tradeoffs, but being gung ho for growth and using markets to guide production, investment, and consumption (including Pigou taxes/subsidies for externalities) does not mean being against "redistribution."
Schrager: The weak link of Neoliberalism was that it was (or least least its rhetoric was) captured by those who were willing to cut taxes (and more on the rich) even w/o cutting expenditure, leading to deficits. That led to trade deficits and slower growth. Also, it talked about DE regulation rather than smart regulation, so neither happened.
I think what Boaz is grasping at is a politics where compromise doesn't result in almost an automatic loss to demagogues in primaries. I don't think that's possible with the current configuration in the US. It would need some combination of ranked choice voting, open primaries and much less gerrymandering. Perhaps term limits too. I kinda like George Will's idea of barring Senators from running for president.
Boaz was just wrong- there isn't a majority of the voter base that is fiscally conservative. In my lifetime there was exactly one instance where a party in power in Congress attempted to fiscally restrain the federal government and that ended the day the War on Terror started.
I am not so sure. I think voters are very ignorant about government spending, and government activity in general, and unfortunately that combines with a strong tendency towards "If my team is doing it, it is good" thinking. The result is they don't think really hard about what is being done and what that all costs, and rather just run with "well, my guys are probably doing the right thing."
I suspect that if you gave most people a detailed federal government budget they would pretty happily find 10-20% in spending reductions in short order. Now, whether a large group of people could agree on what those reductions should be is another question, absolutely. Still, many programs would not stand up to scrutiny among large swaths of the population. There are, for instance, well over 80 needs based assistance programs at the federal level across various agencies (no one knows how many exactly). I think a large majority of the population would agree to a proposal to consolidate those to at least save on administration cost.
Huh? W pushed through a tax cut during a period of balanced budgets. GOP Senator switched parties because of it.
So? That is exactly what I wrote- it all lasted from 1995 until 2001.
Sorry, my bad, I misunderstood. Though I would say the fiscal profligacy started before 9/11