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Comment by gaius | Hacker News Reader

My second warning remark is that I shall refuse to discuss the academic enterprise in financial terms.

In other words, "shut up and cough up, you ignorant plebs, so I can go on sneering at you from the luxury of my ivory tower".

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Do you believe everything must be explicitly defensible within the irrational and innately egotistical and greedy philosophies of finance?

FWIW, finance bigwigs live in actual luxuirous ivory towers.

No, I believe that if an academic can't convince a layperson that what he or she does it worthwhile, they have no business asking them to work harder for longer for less to pay for it.

When did you last see a professor working for free?

finance doesn't magically confer certain properties on humans. human seek to satisfy their wants with limited means. does the pursuit of money lead to evils? sure, but money is only a stand in for other wants. money is a good because it is transparent in a way that other methods of accounting for the distribution of goods isn't. if you can quantify the resources that go towards X instead of Y and yet society claims to value Y above X you have some very useful data to investigate. contrast this with the primary competition for money as a means of distribution: opaque and non-fungible social favor. when a system of social favor redirects resources in a way inconsistent with values it isn't a simple matter of pointing to quantifiable numbers.

I sensed a bit of that too.

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