Home · Book Reports · 2019 · The War on Normal People

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designates my notes. / designates important.

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Thoughts

I found this book interesting if not insightful. My Yang claims to be of the elite class. While I can’t say for sure, I would doubt this greatly. Does he have substation, read: millions, in the bank? Possibly, probably even, but he is in no way a true elite in the string-pulling-oligarchical-deep-state sense. At best I’d say he is a welcome water-carrier for the real elite in promoting what boils down to communism. Still, his opinions do give a glimpse into some of the upper classes’ view on the future of things like jobs and currency.

The continually book espouses, not unjustly, the merits of artificial intelligence. All in all I would say his view is reasonable. While A.I. isn’t going to take over, ala Mr. Musk’s terminators, it is going to slowly phase out workers and be a continually growing stress on our modern economic systems. One example he gives of how far A.I. has come is the A.I. symphony “Adsum” by Iamus.

Overall I agree with the problems put forth in the book, but all in all there are no solutions proposed. Worse, there are outright contradictions. We need people that can take care of themselves, Yang says. Then the next sentence: we need to government to step in and take care of the people. Which is it? Clearly I would say the former, but I suspect the author would prefer the latter.

The silver lining is that Yang at least sees opioid addiction, suicide, divorce, reduced childbirth, etc as economically driven. I’ll give him that. His ‘solution’? Wealth redistribution, if not outright communism, and more socially appropriate technology.

There is no consideration of the fact that when people don’t have money, no matter how much tech and AI there is, business will go under. This will (as I personally hope) lead to a death spiral and essentially force first: an nation/global conversation between what adults may be left and second: some sort of solutions.

Yang talks about social credits, digital even, that can create a parallel economy. This seems to be nothing more than digital dollars, read: bitcoin, but the big change is that they will be called social and people will be expected to brag about how many they have. Somehow this new economy will work better than the dollar based one, even though it will essentially function isomorphically.

One of the more “interesting” proclamations in the book is that there has been no inflation for the last 10 years and no nominal change in car prices since the 70s!

The average wage in 1970s USA was a bit over $9,000. Rent? $108. A gallon of gasoline? $0.36.

Car prices?

• New Dodge Dart: $18,098.92
• New Ford Galaxie 500: $21,675.02
• New Ford Pinto: $13,096.46
• Used 1968 Chevrolet Camaro: $15,662.53
• Used 1968 Chevrolet Impala, Sport Coupe: $16,344.99
• Used 1965 Chrysler Newport: $6,108.04

Overall the entire book seems woo-woo to me. He makes claims like, we need to change xyz, but gives no real path to get there. Actually there is one path he like, more government intervention.

He claims (and I agree here) that our school system is failing us. He points out that the top universities are essentially hedge funds that happen to have schools attached (much like GM is a now bank with a car manufacturer attached). This I also agree with. His solution: tax them! Actually I don’t completely disagree with this. These schools, like many of the modern churches, should not be tax exempt. Still, I don’t think taxing these relatively few universities (and a possibly large amount of churches) are what the solution would really look like. Where is the mention of anything like a consumption tax?

He claims that doctors are the reason for out of control health care, but fails to even mention insurance companies (another name for a bank). It is hard to take him seriously when he misses such obvious (not necessarily root) causes.

At least he admits that, after the jobs start getting seriously reduced, we can’t all be coders.

What I find almost infuriating is that there is no mention of a simple life. Underneath each argument is always an undefined, implied material based that is the foundation of a ‘better’ life. How many people would be quite willing to live on a smaller, but regular, income provided they would have more time to spend with loved one? Why do we insist on the 40 hour work week? Why do we equate merit to hours worked or dollars gained? While I don’t claim to have answers, these, and more, are probably questions that should be asked before we start mucking around with solutions to problems we don’t even understand. At the risk of sounding hippy-dippy, shouldn’t we work out what we want before we even think about how we’ll get it?

Oh, and another, seemingly obvious thing, the most insane idea ever(TM), is never mentioned: cut spending.

Exceptional Excerpts

We tend to use the stock market’s performance as a shorthand indicator of national well-being. However, the median level of stock market investment is close to zero. Only 52 percent of Americans own any stock through a stock mutual fund or a self-directed 401(k) or IRA, and the bottom 80 percent of Americans own only 8 percent of all stocks. Yes, the top 20 percent own 92 percent of stock market holdings.

So what’s normal? The normal American did not graduate from college and doesn’t have an associate’s degree. He or she perhaps attended college for one year or graduated from high school. She or he has a net worth of approximately $36K—about $6K excluding home and vehicle equity—and lives paycheck to paycheck. She or he has less than $500 in flexible savings and minimal assets invested in the stock market. These are median statistics, with 50 percent of Americans below these levels.

There is a lot of repetitive functioning in what we consider high-end professional jobs—what I call intellectual manual labor. A doctor, lawyer, accountant, dentist, or pharmacist will go through years of training and then do the same thing over and over again in slightly different variations. Much of the training is to socialize us into people who can sit still for long periods and behave and operate consistently and reliably. We wear uniforms—either white coats or business suits. We are highly rewarded by the market—paid a lot—and treated with respect anddeference for accruing our expertise and practice.

Basically, we are trained and prepped to become more like machines. But we’ll never be as good as the real thing.

A Pew research study showed that many men are foregoing or delaying marriage because they do not feel financially secure. The same study said that, for women, having a steady job was the single biggest factor they were looking for in a spouse.

In 2015, husband-and-wife economic researchers Anne Case and Angus Deaton found that mortality rates had increased sharply and steadily for middle-aged white Americans after 1999, going up 0.5 percent per year. They figured they must have made a mistake—it’s more or less unheard of in a developed country to have life expectancy go down for any group for more than a momentary blip. Said Deaton: “[W]e thought it must be wrong… we just couldn’t believe that this could have happened, or that if it had, someone else must have already noticed.”

As it turns out, yes, it had happened, and yes, no one had noticed. As Case and Deaton found, suicides were way up. Overdoses from prescription drugs were much higher. Alcoholic liver disease was commonplace.

Case and Deaton point the finger at jobs. Deaton explained, “[J]obs have slowly crumbled away and many more men are finding themselves in a much more hostile labor market with lower wages, lower quality and less permanent jobs. That’s made it harder for them to get married. They don’t get to know their own kids. There’s a lot of social dysfunction building up over time. There’s a sense that these people have lost this sense of status and belonging… these are classic preconditions for suicide.” They noted that the higher mortality rates and deaths of despair applied equally to middle-aged men and women in their study, though men experience these at much higher levels.

People need to take care of themselves = The government should take care of the people.

economist Simon Kuznets, upon introducing the concept of GDP to Congress in 1934, remarked that “economic welfare cannot be adequately measured unless the personal distribution of income is known. And no income measurement undertakes to estimate the reverse side of income, that is, the intensity and unpleasantness of effort going into the earning of income. The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above.” It’s almost like he saw income inequality and bad jobs coming.

At the high end, universities are spending a lot of money on making more money. In 2015, a law professor pointed out that Yale spent more the previous year on private equity managers managing its endowment $480 million—than it spent on tuition assistance, fellowships, and prizes for students—$170 million. This led Malcolm Gladwell to joke that Yale was a $24 billion hedge fund with a university attached to it, and that it should dump its legacy business.

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Table of Contents

• Introduction

Part 1: What’s Happening to Jobs?

• 01: My Journey
• 02: How We Got Here
• 03: Who is Normal in America
• 04: What We Do For a Living
• 05: Factory Workers and Truck Drivers
• 06: White-Collar Jobs Will Disappear, Too
• 07: On Humanity and Work
• 08: The Usual Objections

Part 2: What’s Happening to Us?

• 09: Life in the Bubble
• 10: Mindsets of Scarcity and Abundance
• 11: Geography is Destiny
• 12: Men, Women, and Children
• 13: The Permanent Shadow Class: What Displacement Looks Like
• 14: Video Games and the (Male) Meaning of Life
• 15: The Shape We're In / Disintegration

Part 3: Solutions and Human Capital

• 16: The Freedom Dividend
• 17: Universal Basic Income in the Real World
• 18: Time as the New Money
• 19: Human Capitalism
• 20: The Strong State and the New Citizenship
• 21: Health Care in a World Without Jobs
• 22: Building People
• Conclusion

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• Pages numbers from the pdf.

· Introduction

page 10:

• Between 2.2 and 3.1 million car, bus, and truck driving jobs in the United States will be eliminated by the advent of self-driving vehicles. [in 10-15 years]

• Driving a truck is the most common occupation in 29 states.

• Automation has already eliminated about 4 million manufacturing jobs in the United States since 2000. Instead of finding new jobs, a lot of those people left the workforce and didn’t come back. The U.S. labor force participation rate is now at only 62.9 percent, a rate below that of nearly all other industrialized economies and about the same as that of El Salvador and the Ukraine. Some of this is driven by an aging population, which presents its own set of problems, but much of it is driven by automation and a lower demand for labor.

• Each 1 percent decline in the labor participation rate equates to approximately 2.5 million Americans dropping out. The number of working-age Americans who aren’t in the workforce has surged to a record 95 million.

page 11:

• High rates of unemployment and underemployment are linked to an array of social problems, including substance abuse, domestic violence, child abuse, and depression. Today 40 percent of American children are born outside of married households, due in large part to the crumbling marriage rate among working-class adults, and overdoses and suicides have overtaken auto accidents as leading causes of death. More than half of American households already rely on the government for direct income in some form.

Part 1: What’s Happening to Jobs?

· 01: My Journey

· 02: How We Got Here

page 24:

• Ninety-four percent of the jobs created between 2005 and 2015 were temp or contractor jobs without benefits; people working multiple gigs to make ends meet is increasingly the norm.

page 25:

• the major banks grew and evolved as Depression-era regulations separating consumer lending and investment banking were abolished. Financial deregulation started under Ronald Reagan in 1980 and culminated in the Financial Services Modernization Act of 1999 under Bill Clinton that really set the banks loose.

· 03: Who is Normal in America

page 31:

• The future is already here—it’s just unevenly distributed. —WILLIAM GIBSON

page 35:

• For average Americans with high school diplomas or some college, the median net worth hovers around $36,000, including home equity—63.7 percent of Americans own their home, down from a high of 69 percent in 2004. However, their net worth goes down to only $9,000–$12,000 if you don’t include home equity, and only $4,000–7,000 if you remove the value of their car.

page 39:

• We tend to use the stock market’s performance as a shorthand indicator of national well-being. However, the median level of stock market investment is close to zero. Only 52 percent of Americans own any stock through a stock mutual fund or a self-directed 401(k) or IRA, and the bottom 80 percent of Americans own only 8 percent of all stocks. Yes, the top 20 percent own 92 percent of stock market holdings.

page 40:

• So what’s normal? The normal American did not graduate from college and doesn’t have an associate’s degree. He or she perhaps attended college for one year or graduated from high school. She or he has a net worth of approximately $36K—about $6K excluding home and vehicle equity—and lives paycheck to paycheck. She or he has less than $500 in flexible savings and minimal assets invested in the stock market. These are median statistics, with 50 percent of Americans below these levels.

· 04: What We Do For a Living

page 43:

• We’ve all had crummy experiences with voice recognition software and pounded our phone keys until we got a human on the line. But the AI experience is about to improve to a point where we’re not going to be able to tell the difference. Several companies right now employ a hybrid approach where voice recordings are combined with a human in the Philippines tapping buttons so that a Filipino can “call” you but you think you’re talking to a native speaker because you’re hearing a prerecorded voice. This is called accent-erasing software.

• The year 2017 marked the beginning of what is being called the “Retail Apocalypse.” One hundred thousand department store workers were laid off between October 2016 and May 2017—more than all of the people employed in the coal industry combined.

page 44:

• Among the chains that have declared bankruptcy recently are Payless (4,496 stores), BCBG (175 stores), Aeropostale (800 stores), Bebe (180 stores), and the Limited (250 stores). As of 2017, those in danger of default include Claire’s (2,867 stores), Gymboree (1,200 stores), Nine West (800 stores), True Religion (900 stores)

page 47:

• Amazon doesn’t even need to make money. In its 20 years as a public company, Amazon often has not turned a profit. A number of years ago, some financial types noticed and shorted the stock, saying, “Amazon doesn’t make money.” In response, Amazon founder Jeff Bezos stopped investing in anything new for a year and ramped up profitability.

page 51:

• Starship Technologies has 20 or so robots deployed that are already learning their local terrain in Washington, DC, which has officially made self-driving robots legal on its sidewalks. These robots will eliminate the need for many delivery people.

· 05: Factory Workers and Truck Drivers

· 06: White-Collar Jobs Will Disappear, Too

page 59:

• There is a lot of repetitive functioning in what we consider high-end professional jobs—what I call intellectual manual labor. A doctor, lawyer, accountant, dentist, or pharmacist will go through years of training and then do the same thing over and over again in slightly different variations. Much of the training is to socialize us into people who can sit still for long periods and behave and operate consistently and reliably. We wear uniforms—either white coats or business suits. We are highly rewarded by the market—paid a lot—and treated with respect anddeference for accruing our expertise and practice.

• Basically, we are trained and prepped to become more like machines. But we’ll never be as good as the real thing.

page 61:

• IBM computer Deep Blue defeated the world’s foremost chess master in 1996

page 64:

• The first robot dental implantation—with no human intervention—just took place in China in September 2017. The robot went in and installed two new implants that had been printed by a 3D printer.

page 65:

• Most people assume that humans will always have the advantage over AI when it comes to work that requires creativity, like painting or music, and jobs that requires nuanced, sensitive human interaction, like therapy. In fact, Google’s neural network, a computer system modeled to “think” like a human, has produced art that could easily be confused for a human being’s, like the work on the next page. You can also check out a symphony online that was composed by a software program, Iamus, which many listeners found indiscernible from a human composition when it was performed. Google “Adsum” by Iamus and take a listen.

• USC researchers funded by the Department of Defense in 2016 created an AI therapist named Ellie to treat veterans for post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Ellie appears as a video avatar and provides soothing questions and responses. Ellie measures voice tone and facial expressions to try to identify whether a soldier needs to seek additional treatment with a human counselor. Early research is promising and indicates that soldiers often feel more comfortable confiding in a clearly artificial therapist than an actual human being. Ellie is meant to be a complement to human therapists—but one can easily imagine her checking in with patients in between appointments and taking on more over time.

· 07: On Humanity and Work

page 68:

• Yuval Harari in Homo Deus makes the point that our cab driver can look into the sky, contemplate the meaning of life, tear up at the sounds of an opera, and generally do a million things that a robot driver cannot. But most of those things don’t matter to us when we get into the back of the cab. Oftentimes, we’d prefer to be left alone rather than make conversation.

• One of the common themes of the new economy is that women are better equipped to excel in the growth areas and opportunities in a service economy, including nurturing and teaching other people, which are among the toughest activities to automate. Conventionally male dominated jobs like manufacturing, warehouse shelving, and truck driving are among the easiest. I’ve heard women say, “Why don’t men just adapt and take on more ‘feminine’ roles?”

· 08: The Usual Objections

page 73:

• The advent of big farms, tractors, factories, assembly lines, and personal computers, while each a very big deal for the labor market, were orders of magnitude less revolutionary than advancements like artificial intelligence, machine learning, self-driving vehicles, advanced robotics, smartphones, drones, 3D printing, virtual and augmented reality, the Internet of things, genomics, digital currencies, and nanotechnology.

• Data is about to supplant human judgment.

page 74:

• in 1910 only 19 percent of American teenagers were in a high school, and barely 9 percent of 18-year-olds graduated. By 1940, 73 percent of teenagers were in high school and the median American graduated.

page 78:

• There are presently a record 95 million working-age Americans, a full 37 percent of adults, who are out of the workforce. In 2000, there were only 70 million. The change can be explained in part by demographics—higher numbers of students and retirees—but there are still 5 million Americans out of the workforce who would like a job right now that aren’t considered in the unemployment rate.

Part 2: What’s Happening to Us?

· 09: Life in the Bubble

page 90:

• Julie Lythcott-Haims, a dean at Stanford, wrote a book in 2015 about the changing character of the students she was seeing, who had gone in one generation from independent young adults to “brittle” and “existentially impotent.” In 2014, an American College Health Association survey of close to 100,000 college students reported that 86 percent felt overwhelmed by all they had to do, 54 percent felt overwhelming anxiety, and 8 percent seriously considered suicide in the last 12 months.

page 97:

• Today, thanks to assortative mating in a handful of cities, intellect, attractiveness, education, and wealth are all converging in the same families and neighborhoods. I look at my friends’ children, and many of them resemble unicorns: brilliant, beautiful, socially precocious creatures who have gotten the best of all possible resources since the day they were born. I imagine them in 10 or 15 years traveling to other parts of the country, and I know that they are going to feel like, and be received as, strangers in a strange land. They will have thriving online lives and not even remember a car that didn’t drive itself. They may feel they have nothing in common with the people before them. Their ties to the greater national fabric will be minimal. Their empathy and desire to subsidize and address the distress of the general public will likely be lower and lower. Yuval Harari, the Israeli scholar, suggests that “the way we treat stupid people in the future will be the way we treat animals today.”

· 10: Mindsets of Scarcity and Abundance

page 103:

• It’s quite plausible that as steady and predictable work and income become more and more rare, our culture is becoming dumber, more impulsive

· 11: Geography is Destiny

page 108:

• The central point is this: In places where jobs disappear, society falls apart.

· 12: Men, Women, and Children

page 115:

• A Pew research study showed that many men are foregoing or delaying marriage because they do not feel financially secure. The same study said that, for women, having a steady job was the single biggest factor they were looking for in a spouse.

· 13: The Permanent Shadow Class: What Displacement Looks Like

page 121:

• In 2015, husband-and-wife economic researchers Anne Case and Angus Deaton found that mortality rates had increased sharply and steadily for middle-aged white Americans after 1999, going up 0.5 percent per year. They figured they must have made a mistake—it’s more or less unheard of in a developed country to have life expectancy go down for any group for more than a momentary blip. Said Deaton: “[W]e thought it must be wrong… we just couldn’t believe that this could have happened, or that if it had, someone else must have already noticed.”

• As it turns out, yes, it had happened, and yes, no one had noticed. As Case and Deaton found, suicides were way up. Overdoses from prescription drugs were much higher. Alcoholic liver disease was commonplace.

• Case and Deaton point the finger at jobs. Deaton explained, “[J]obs have slowly crumbled away and many more men are finding themselves in a much more hostile labor market with lower wages, lower quality and less permanent jobs. That’s made it harder for them to get married. They don’t get to know their own kids. There’s a lot of social dysfunction building up over time. There’s a sense that these people have lost this sense of status and belonging… these are classic preconditions for suicide.” They noted that the higher mortality rates and deaths of despair applied equally to middle-aged men and women in their study, though men experience these at much higher levels.

page 122:

• Many of the deaths are from opiate overdoses. Approximately 59,000 Americans died of drug overdoses in 2016, up 19 percent from the then record 52,404 reported in 2015.

• The five states with the highest rates of death linked to drug overdoses in 2016 were West Virginia, New Hampshire, Kentucky, Ohio, and Rhode Island.

• In 12 states there are more opioid prescriptions than there are people.

page 123:

• A study showed that one out of every 550 patients started on opioid therapy died of opioid-related causes a median of 2.6 years after their first opioid prescription.

• Ninety percent of heroin users are white.

page 125:

• One judge who administers disability decisions said that “if the American public knew what was going on in our system, half would be outraged and the other half would apply for benefits.”

· 14: Video Games and the (Male) Meaning of Life

page 129:

• As of last year, 22 percent of men between the ages of 21 and 30 with less than a bachelor’s degree reported not working at all in the previous year—up from only 9.5 percent in 2000.

page 130:

• The image of legions of men in their parents’ basements playing video games for hours on end may seem pathetic or sad. But their satisfaction level is high. “Happiness has gone up for this group,” says Hurst

• “There is some evidence that these young, lower-skilled men who are happy in their 20s become much less happy in their 30s or 40s,”

page 131:

• Games have come a long way since I was a kid, and they’re about to take yet another leap forward. Virtual reality headsets are creating experiences that will take simulations to a whole new level. Digital entertainments will get better and better. The analogue and the real world will become less and less appealing. Before long, video games, virtual reality, and pornography will merge into new forms of immersive experiences that will be more and more compelling.

· 15: The Shape We’re In / Disintegration

Part 3: Solutions and Human Capital

· 16: The Freedom Dividend

• In a future without jobs, people will need to be able to provide for themselves and their basic needs. Eventually, the government will need to intervene in order to prevent widespread squalor, despair, and violence. The sooner the government acts, the more high-functioning our society will be. The first major change would be to implement a universal basic income (UBI), which I would call the “Freedom Dividend.”

• People need to take care of themselves = The government should take care of the people.

page 147:

• the U.S. government printed over $4 trillion in new money for its quantitative easing program following the 2008 financial collapse. This money went to the balance sheets of the banks and depressed interest rates. It punished savers and retirees. There was little to no inflation.

• WHAT?

· 17: Universal Basic Income in the Real World

page 155:

• Inflation has been low for years, in part because technology and globalization have been reducing the costs of many things. Even the printing of $4 trillion in monetary easing after the financial crisis didn’t cause meaningful inflation.

page 156:

• Cars cost the same in nominal terms as when I was growing up

• Cars cost the same in nominal terms as the 70s?

• How much ever made it off the bank’s balance sheets?

· 18: Time as the New Money

page 158:

• To be able to fill leisure intelligently is the last product of civilization… —BERTRAND RUSSELL

• A man… with no means of filling up time, is as miserable out of work as a dog on the chain. —GEORGE ORWELL

• This is who he choses to quote? It is like a sign: ’this book is part of the oligarchy’s plan to reshape society’.

page 163:

• Digital Social Credits to create a parallel economy.

· 19: Human Capitalism

page 165:

• voting securely in your local elections via your smartphone without any worry of fraud.

page 166:

• Adam Smith, the Scottish economist who wrote The Wealth of Nations in 1776, is often regarded as the father of modern capitalism. His ideas of an invisible hand that guides the market, division of labor, and that self interest and competition lead to wealth creation have been so deeply internalized that today we take most of them for granted.

• Karl Marx published Das Kapital in 1867 and argued that capitalism contained internal tensions that would oppress the working class, who would eventually rise up and take control. Our perception is that capitalism—embodied by the West and the United States—won the war of ideas by generating immense growth and wealth and elevating the standard of living of billions of people.

page 167:

• economist Simon Kuznets, upon introducing the concept of GDP to Congress in 1934, remarked that “economic welfare cannot be adequately measured unless the personal distribution of income is known. And no income measurement undertakes to estimate the reverse side of income, that is, the intensity and unpleasantness of effort going into the earning of income. The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above.” It’s almost like he saw income inequality and bad jobs coming.

· 20: The Strong State and the New Citizenship

page 172:

• Elites in general have gotten too cozy. We all went to the same colleges,…

• This guy thinks he is elite?

• Elon Musk in 2017 called for proactive regulation of AI, calling it “a fundamental risk to the existence of civilization.” Techies don’t often call for regulation of their own industries, so you know it must be serious.

• Or he is getting the ball rolling on some artificial barriers to entry.

page 175:

• One idea is instituting an American Exchange Program or Citizenship Trip, during which all graduating high school seniors go on a month-long trip to several different parts of the country, hosted by host families and paid for by the government. They would volunteer for a local organization and participate in programming with 24 other high school graduates from diverse regions and backgrounds. The 25 young people would get to know each other in structured yet personal ways. It could be run by the top-rated schoolteachers and professors in the region each August and take place at high schools or community colleges. There would be some required programming on the basics of citizenship and civic investment.

• Afterward, everyone would have at least a few friends from vastly different backgrounds.

• What better way to build communities than showing everyone how great moving away from home can be. Get those children away from their families and indoctrinate them good. It is run by teachers!

• the American Exchange Program would give people more of a reason to explore other parts of the country and maybe even move someplace different if an opportunity calls for it. It would open minds and hearts.

· 21: Health Care in a World Without Jobs

page 180:

• The system rewards activity and output over health improvements and outcomes. Changing these incentives is key. The most direct way to do so would be to move toward a single-payer health care system…

• a “Medicare-for-all” movement is currently gathering steam. There would inevitably remain a handful of private options for the super-affluent, but most everyone would use the generalized care.

• Good enough for the plebs.

• 100% focus on doctors, no mention of insurance companies pushing prices up.

· 22: Building People

page 189:

• The trend of cohousing is increasingly popular among millennials, and there are already 150 cohousing communities in the United States. Communal living arrangements have been shown to increase social cohesion

• Communism, it’ll work this time! And people are cohousing because it is so good, not because they are broke….

page 191:

• One-third of college graduates are working in jobs that don’t require a degree.

page 193:

• At the high end, universities are spending a lot of money on making more money. In 2015, a law professor pointed out that Yale spent more the previous year on private equity managers managing its endowment $480 million—than it spent on tuition assistance, fellowships, and prizes for students—$170 million. This led Malcolm Gladwell to joke that Yale was a $24 billion hedge fund with a university attached to it, and that it should dump its legacy business.

· Conclusion