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Comment by quacked | Hacker News Reader

More and more often, large institutions like bloated corporations or swollen universities feel like giant holes where people go to mine money. The American Dream is to have all of your paperwork in order so you can set your tent up right above a rich vein.

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I think that’s a really, really good way to put it. The American Dream has moved away from pioneering new value streams to acquiring pedigrees/credentials that enable you to extract cash from an existing stream.

I sort of agree but I don't think we're quite there yet.

The only time I here anyone speak favorably about owning a business that's protected by regulation or milking a professional license is if it's part of some grand scheme to make a ton of money and then cash out of <coastal state goes here>.

Really? What about “work in FAANG”, “become a doctor/lawyer” or “work at the big four”?

Whenever “education is the key to prosperity” is sold as a panacea, it is always sold as a way to go work for easy cash with a credentialist moat.

Ever seen this series or author?

https://thelastpsychiatrist.com/2012/11/hipsters_on_food_sta...

The American dream has moved to China and is doing just fine.

Oddly enough, this is the most optimistic way I've seen the state of our institutions described without agressively veering into the realm of fiction

What about it strikes you as optimistic? I felt pretty pessimistic when I wrote it.

The framing of people as prospectors looking to stake out their plot of a mine.

I'd have framed the analogy in the terms of a tick climbing a tree for the opportunity to latch onto a large, diseased animal.

A prospector might go on to do something great with what he's extracted. A tick just wants to survive, and hopes that his meal will outlast him.

As they say in The Wire, "We used to make shit in this company, build shit. Now we just put our hands in the next guy's pocket."

Oh, it gets better. A person's mind doesn't have a "nop" instruction. People won't just sit quietly with hands in pockets, they need to have goals, leaders, followers, outcasts, competing dog packs... So what we are witnessing right now is a birth of a de-facto religion with its dogmas, saints, sinners, witches, indulgence salespeople and the Holy Inquisition.

And, honestly, I liked the times of building shit much more.

Someone made a table with all the woke faiths: https://cdn.substack.com/image/fetch/f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_p...

Here's a fantastic paper you might find interesting: https://s3.amazonaws.com/s3.documentcloud.org/documents/6974...

This seems like a leap. Admin has increased 45% in the same time faculty has increased 56%. And the timeframe is 20 years. Is there too much bureaucracy? I don’t know. But I don’t think this article is enough to say so. The faculty quotes don’t offer any concrete information, unless you’ve already decided what you’re going to believe, I guess.

I definitely have already decided what I'm going to believe, and I read this article as confirming my prior beliefs. But it's not just universities--government agencies and large corporations (both of which I've worked at and with) both seem to fall into the practice of "defending a huge pipeline of cash flow and allowing the properly-credentialed to siphon off larger amounts". It's not just the increase in administration that's lead to this; I would say that the increase in administration is actually a symptom of this.

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