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Comment by gumby | Hacker News Reader

The article says, "In the 17th century, people sometimes issued perpetual debt." True, but not just in the 17th century; consols have been issued into the mid 20th century, mainly for war (from the Napoleonic wars up to WWII).

The article also mentions, parenthetically, "The interest rate was reduced to 3.5% and then 2.5% during the 17th century." Does anyone know if this was specific or if some law alterered interest rates?

The bond is older than Yale itself (though FWIW there are plenty of schools still operating that are older than this bond).

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> ...there are plenty of schools still operating that are older than this bond

At the time of the Aztecs, the University of Oxford was already an ancient institution older than the USA is today.

> FWIW there are plenty of schools still operating that are older than this bond

There are, or at least recently were, 62 such schools. Indeed, besides the Catholic Church, the Lutheran Church, and the Parliaments of Iceland and the Isle of Man, every organization in the western world that's been continuously operating since 1530 is a university[1]. I believe this is why it's critically important that universities remain focused on their timeless mission rather than chasing secular fads. The Buxton index, described in the below link, is an incredibly important concept.

[1] https://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/transcriptions/EWD11xx/E...

> My third remark introduces you to the Buxton Index, so named after its inventor, Professor John Buxton, at the time at Warwick University. The Buxton Index of an entity, i.e. person or organization, is defined as the length of the period, measured in years, over which the entity makes its plans. For the little grocery shop around the corner it is about 1/2,for the true Christian it is infinity, and for most other entities it is in between: about 4 for the average politician who aims at his re-election, slightly more for most industries, but much less for the managers who have to write quarterly reports. The Buxton Index is an important concept because close co-operation between entities with very different Buxton Indices invariably fails and leads to moral complaints about the partner. The party with the smaller Buxton Index is accused of being superficial and short-sighted, while the party with the larger Buxton Index is accused of neglect of duty, of backing out of its responsibility, of freewheeling, etc.. In addition, each party accuses the other one of being stupid. The great advantage of the Buxton Index is that, as a simple numerical notion, it is morally neutral and lifts the difference above the plane of moral concerns. The Buxton Index is important to bear in mind when considering academic/industrial co-operation.

Not just universities; there are also extant high schools going back at least to the sixth century.

I don't know if that interest rate was specific. But there is a family in Missouri that receives a couple of percent of the NBA's television deal revenues annually to this day despite never owning a basketball team that played an NBA game.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/1975–76_Spirits_of_St._Louis...

> The Spirits were not included in the ABA-NBA merger, but the Silna brothers nonetheless managed to turn it into one of the greatest deals in the history of professional sports. In June 1976 the ABA owners agreed, in return for the Spirits of St. Louis ceasing operations, to pay the St. Louis owners $2.2 million in cash up front in addition to a 1/7 share of the four remaining teams' television revenues in perpetuity. As the NBA's popularity exploded in 1980s and 1990s, the league's television rights were sold to CBS and then NBC, and additional deals were struck with the TNT and TBS cable networks; league television revenue soared into the hundreds of millions of dollars.

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