Steve Teles: belief

Transcript context

…So how do they fix it… They can take that rent in part by getting large contributions from alumni and distribute it within the university however they want, and they have the control of anybody except the insiders over it. I think one thing you actually found is universities have been taking a huge amount of that rent and actually putting it into administration over the last 20, 30 years. My colleague in the… One of my colleagues in the department in political science has written a large, long book basically looking at the explosion of academic administration. I think when universities were extracting rent and putting it into research, there was an argument that that was generally a socially productive equilibrium, but now that they’re putting it into administration, which has a lot but very complicated explanation from that, I think that rent extraction has certainly not been producing these spillover effects for society. Here’s a question from a reader. I’ll just read this out word for word. “If the government is tilting the economy in favor of large corporations versus small businesses, certainly that’s bad for growth but doesn’t it increase equality? Bigger companies pay higher salaries and almost certainly more uniform ones, and on the capital income side, anyone… Can invest more easily in the larger company.” Your reaction?…

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