University Diaries » An Addendum to UD’s Post About Hillary Clinton and the University of Nevada Las Vegas.

Here’s my earlier post about students there protesting her $225,000 fee for giving a speech on campus. (Or, as Ruth Marcus lowballs it in the Washington Post, “flying by private jet to pick up a check for $200,000 to stand at a podium for an hour.”)

And here, from an article you should read in its entirety, is an excellent statement of what I’m calling the Spending Down problem:

There can never be enough super-rich Americans to power a great economy. I earn about 1,000 times the median American annually, but I don’t buy thousands of times more stuff. My family purchased three cars over the past few years, not 3,000. I buy a few pairs of pants and a few shirts a year, just like most American men. I bought two pairs of the fancy wool pants I am wearing as I write, what my partner Mike calls my “manager pants.” I guess I could have bought 1,000 pairs. But why would I? Instead, I sock my extra money away in savings, where it doesn’t do the country much good.

American university students will stop being shocked by politicians and other celebrities being paid $300,000 to give a speech at UCLA when they can be made to understand the Why would I? problem. This guy solves it by pointlessly stashing it away. Imelda Marcos solved it by buying up all the shoes in the world. Our universities’ foundations solve it by paying $300,000 for a dinner speaker.

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UPDATE: Noam Scheiber calls it “the plutocracy problem.”

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