Economic growth is non zero sum. Everyone can get richer at the same time as available capital increases or workers become more productive due to greater human capital. Stocks are giving a company money to invest in return for a share of future profits. VC and bonds are lending money to companies to invest for a future payment. Those companies are investing in productive capital assets or in making their workers more productive. Not zero sum.

It's not zero sum, it is negative sum: it comes at the cost of using up non-renewable resources and destroying the environment.

You can invest in companies that are building/using renewable energy and/or helping the environment.

I used to think this, but in the past few decades I became convinced that only reduction in economic activity will help the environment.

Surely either replacing a coal plant with a nuclear one, or capturing the concentrated carbon dioxide right out of the smokestack, would help the environment with no reduction in economic activity.

Money isn’t zero sum because it has velocity. Companies financed with stock buy equipment using that cash, which the equipment manufacturers use to pay their employees, who then spend it at supermarkets...

Stop. You've got it completely backwards.

The entire point of doing research - devising a theory, doing an experiment, assessing the results, revising the theory - is to find knowledge that could be benefit humanity.

However, research itself NEVER guarantees up front if a theory, an idea, an experiment,... is going to yield a beneficial outcome for humanity.

It's literally: you can't say "well, this experiment is going to yield a useful vaccin, medicine, tool,..." because the very definition of experimentation and research is trial and error.

Maybe it will take a 2 billion dollars to find a vaccin, maybe it will take 20 billion dollars. Maybe it will take 3 months, maybe it will take 3 years. It's literally impossible to predict up front.

This is not just true for medicine, this is true for any and all research that takes place at Universities.

So, if you're going to scale the endowments to academic research based on the "economic productive results" their research yields, well, you're going to miss a massive amount of opportunities.

Moreover, academic researchers don't just get bags of money so they can do whatever they fancy. That's not how this works.

The funding of the vast majority of research projects requires the application of grant proposals which are then reviewed and vetted by peers and governance boards. When the results are published, the project also have to yield a balance sheet and stringent reporting on how they spend those grants.

The vast majority of research proposals are thoroughly scrutinized. You can't just whip up a proposal and a fancy experiment and think you'll get funding. Academia is a cut-throat business if you want to do any meaningful research. Ask any researcher and they will tell you that they agonize whether they'll get the funding they need to continue what they are doing next year.

Academia is a hard place to work exactly because that's how the best ideas float to the top.

As Edison famously said about inventing the electric lightbulb:

> "I speak without exaggeration when I say that I have constructed three thousand different theories in connection with the electric light, each one of them reasonable and apparently to be true. Yet only in two cases did my experiments prove the truth of my theory. My chief difficulty, as perhaps you know, was in constructing the carbon filament, the incandescence of which is the source of the light."

Exactly. Think about the Wright brothers and flight. They didn't simply set out one day, build a plane, took the hills and flew the kite. It took them many failed attempts and a big risky investment in material and time before they were even able to take off. At the time, they didn't know if they'd succeed.

So. No. "Productive" is the wrong bar to assess the value of research by.

My reply is exactly what another commenter wrote:

>The discussion isn't about university research money and whether that is spent productively, it's about endowments, which are nothing more than investment funds.

>The question is whether it is productive to maintain large investment funds unrelated to their stated goals of education and research.

>I think the OP would be happier if those endowments were drawn down on research with uncertain benefits rather than just invested in natural resource extraction companies.

I am in favor of big research budgets, if real and valuable research is being done. I know there are a lot of uncertainties there and that there isn't always a direct 1-to-1 correlation between spending and benefit for the economy/humanity.

That is still positive sum. But it's something different. I'm referring to zero sum hoarding, not research funds.

The discussion isn't about university research money and whether that is spent productively, it's about endowments, which are nothing more than investment funds.

The question is whether it is productive to maintain large investment funds unrelated to their stated goals of education and research.

I think the OP would be happier if those endowments were drawn down on research with uncertain benefits rather than just invested in natural resource extraction companies.