These researchers are more self-serving than any philanthropist I've met could be. This is an old argument, mainly by people who have an interest in having gove

These researchers are more self-serving than any philanthropist I've met could be. This is an old argument, mainly by people who have an interest in having government, or worse, their own institutions direct funding to their own affinity groups. But I'm going to be provocative because there is an elephant sized naked emperor in the room. Professional academics and their administrators generally live in an archipelago of planned economies that require exogenous revenue sources for "funding," the same way the oppressive bureaucracies of the 20th century depended on resource extraction to fund their systems. Where instead of mineral resource wealth, they live on "funding" that is extracted from elsewhere and then struggled for politically within the bureaucracy. Nobody has the advantage of making anything anyone wants, it's just a raw struggle for power as its own end. Charities give, whereas bureaucracies fund in their own interests. We tolerate this academic luxury communism in the west because a free society means letting people live as they choose, and in return, they run a cash for honours racket that occasionally produces some strategic technologies. The trouble starts when they get bored (like in this article) and won't stay in their lane. It's ironic that the last 30 years of critical theory has been about telling every other discipline that people can't be sincere or objective because of bias from their own power and interests, and yet we don't see these researchers attacking charity as utterly compromised by their role as launderers for political policy objectives that consolidate control by a captured state. On this basis, I reject the argument that bureaucrats or their flatterers and apologists are better able to distribute wealth than the philanthropists and their families who made it.